The history of modalization of the verb sledovat'
Abstract
The article describes the transformation of the semantic structure of the verb sledovat’ ‘to follow’ in the 18th century. On the basis of lexicographic sources and a large number of examples of the use of the verb, extracted from the Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire, as well as from the National Corpus of the Russian language, changes in the semantic structure of the verb sledovat’ in the post-Petrine era are shown. The new meanings of the verb were the result of the semantic calquing of the verb sledovat’ from European languages (German folgen, French suivre). The modal meaning ‘must’ of the verb sledovat' emerges by the middle of the 18th century on the basis of the meaning ‘to relate to someone, to something’. The modalization of the verb took place in official texts, where the correspondence of an action to existing laws was established.
References
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