Picking apart Russian particles. An empirical study on the meaning and use of že and ved’

Abstract

This thesis explores the meaning and use of the Russian particles že and ved‘, as well as their relationship. In this thesis I carry out three investigations using cognitive linguistic methods, corpus data and statistical methods. First, I explore the meaning and use of že and ved‘ and how they are translated to English using parallel corpus data. I propose a radial category for both že and ved‘ and show how these networks relate. In my second investigation I use corpus data and statistical tools to examine which factors may influence the replaceability of že with ved‘, focusing on the part of speech to the left of že (POS), the submeanings I recognised in my first investigation and the way the Russian National Corpus (RNC) tags že. I show that the POS appears to be the most influential factor. My third investigation looks further at this. I carried out a questionnaire focusing on seven combinations of the POS and submeanings of že from my second investigation to see if it is possible to add ved‘ instead of že. My findings are not conclusive, but show that ved‘ appears to be most replaceable when the POS is adverb and the submeaning is Emphasiser. Whilst these results are not conclusive on the relationship between že and ved‘, this thesis presents že and ved‘ in a way that can facilitate learners of Russian in understanding these lexemes better.