Dataset description:
This is a study of examples of Russian impersonal constructions with the modal word možno ‘can, be possible’ with and without the future copula budet ‘will be,’ i.e., možno + budet + INF and možno + INF. The data was collected in 2020-2021 from the old version of the Russian National Corpus (ruscorpora.ru).
In the spreadsheet 01DataMoznoBudet, the data merges the results of four searches conducted to extract examples of sentences with the following construction types: možno + budet + INF.PFV, možno + budet + INF.IPFV, možno + INF.PFV and možno + INF.IPFV. The results for each search were downloaded, pseudorandomized, and the first 200 examples were manually annotated, based on the syntactic analyses given in the corpus. The syntactic and morphological categories used in the corpus are explained here: https://ruscorpora.ru/corpus/main.
In the spreadsheet 01DataZavtraMoznoBudet, the data merges the results of four searches conducted to extract examples of sentences with the following structure: zavtra + možno + budet + INF.PFV, zavtra + možno + budet + INF.IPFV, zavtra + možno + INF.PFV and zavtra + možno + INF.IPFV. All of the examples (103 sentences) were imported to a spreadsheet and annotated manually, based on the syntactic analyses given in the corpus. The syntactic and morphological categories used in the corpus are explained here: https://ruscorpora.ru/corpus/main.
Article abstract:
This paper examines Russian impersonal constructions with the modal word možno ‘can, be possible’ with and without the future copula budet ‘will be,’ i.e., možno + budet + INF and možno + INF. My contribution can be summarized as follows. First, corpus-based evidence reveals that možno + INF constructions are vastly more frequent than constructions with copula. Second, the meaning of constructions without the future copula is more flexible: while the possibility is typically located in the present, the situation denoted by the infinitive may be located in the present or the future. Third, I show that the možno + INF construction is more ambiguous and can denote present, gnomic or future situations. Fourth, I identify a number of contextual factors that unambiguously locate the situation in the future. I demonstrate that such factors are more frequently used with the future copula, and thus motivate the choice between the two constructions. Finally, I illustrate the interpretations in a straightforward manner by means of schemas of the type used in cognitive linguistics.
