Adverbs of measure and degree in S. Dovlatov’s prose: corpus research

The subject of the research is adverbs of measure and degree functioning in the prose works of the Russian writer Sergei Donatovich Dovlatov. The linguistic analysis of the writer’s idiostyle has been performed in the aspect of the category of intensity, whose semantic content is characterized by a high degree of manifestation of an object’s feature. The aim of the study is to describe the syntagmatic and semantic-pragmatic features of certain adverbs of measure and degree in the writer’s texts. The relevance of the research is determined by the application of corpus tools for describing the linguistic features of the literary text. The research employs the method of structural-semantic description and various methods of corpus linguistics. The work is based on the material of the subcorpus «S. Dovlatov’s Texts», created by the author of the article on the platform of the National Corpus of the Russian Language and including 38 prose works by the writer. Based on the «Word Frequency» criterion, the most frequent adverbs of measure and degree were identified as means of expressing intensity semantics (very, completely, too, barely, absolutely, terribly, much, excessively, slightly etc.). The volume of concordances includes more than 1,100 text examples. Special attention is paid to the adverbs completely and too, which reflect elements of the writer’s axiological picture of the world. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that it is the first time that all collocation patterns of these adverbs have been identified, their semantic and pragmatic meanings have been determined, and occasional collocations (for example, a completely wild question), forming unique characteristics of S. Dovlatov’s idiostyle have been discovered.