Subjectival Constructions in Russian (Po-mojemy 'to my mind' and its family)

At different levels of discourse it is important to keep connected the introduced point of view with its beholder. In Russian language subjectivity may be expressed by means of lexical constructions (e.g. mnije kažetsja, čto …, ja sčitaju, etc.) or special group of parenthetical words (i.e. po-mojemu, po-tvojemu, po-nasemu, etc.). The latter group shares derivational morphological type, but each of the forms has its own semantics and subjectivity is not equally expressed in each case. The current work focuses on comparing five parentheticals of this very group: po-mojemu, po-tvojemu, po-nasemu, po-vasemu, and po-ihnemu. Subjectification is a process of shaping our attitude to the source of information, whether we rely on it or not, share the opinion or separate one from the others. The current micro-research within one group of related words shows how to measure subjectivity and reveal their typical grammatical environment. The main aim of this paper is to investigate Russian subjective constructions. In particular, we examined the use of parenthetical expressions of po-mojemu and its derivatives. To evaluate the degree of subjectivity and what unites this group of parentheticals, it was necessary to take into account many aspects, including modality, evidentiality, deixis, and discourse background. Furthermore, in some instances it was possible to track the changes that constructions have underwent throughout the years. In order to achieve the goal, the whole research was divided into several stages and areas of inspection. First of all, the majority of research has been carried out on the materials of Russian National Corpus. Data from the main search and parallel corpus were supplemented by a representative section of Old Russian examples.