Proximative and apprehensive modality
discursive markers in Russian and Ukrainian and their equivalents in French
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60056/SE.2026.1.57-66Keywords:
imminence, discourse markers, apprehensive constructions, Russian, Ukrainian, FrenchAbstract
The article focuses on the expression of imminence through discourse markers in Russian and Ukrainian, such as того и гляди, which is linked in most of its contexts of use to the expression of apprehension. In Ukrainian, there is a fairly wide variety of equivalents for this marker, which raises the issue of the grammaticalization of discursive structures found in the Ukrainian corpus. Analysis of the parallel corpus reveals another frequent equivalent, the reduplicated adverbial deictic ось or от, which conveys an idea of imminence without the semantic nuances specific to the discourse marker того и гляди. Contrastive analysis shows that the most frequent equivalent of imminence in French is the periphrastic future tense, which shares a number of criteria with the discourse markers studied.
References
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