RUSSIAN ADVERB DAVNO ‚LONG AGO, FOR A LONG TIME‘ REVISITED FROM A CORPUS PERSPECTIVE
Authors:   Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, Yanko T. E. ,   Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, Moscow, Russia
Published: November 2020

During the last twenty years, the Russian adverb davno ‘long ago, for a long time’ was widely discussed in literature. It was recognized that the unique parameter of davno is its inability to be the theme of a sentence. Moreover, if davno functions in the context of aspectual forms relating to the past it can only be the rheme. In the context of the aspectual verbal forms relating to the past but preserving the connection with the moment of speech, davno can be either the rheme proper, or a component of the rheme. A classic example of an aspectual verb form referring to the past is the general factual meaning of the imperfective aspect. At present, the spoken data corpora can shed light on the communicative structure analysis, since the prosodic structure of the sound speech provides a straightforward access to the communicative structure. Novel parameters of davno are as follows. 1) Whereas davno is traditionally recognized as a word of rhematic polarity it can nevertheless function as a component of the theme in the context of attributive clauses and constructions (Davno soglasovannyj visit dolzhen byl sostojatjsja v aprele ‘A visit planned long ago would take place in April’). 2) The general factual meaning of the imperfective aspect, contrary to what was assumed before, is not an absolute prerequisite for davno to function as the rheme. The spoken corpus showed that in the context of negation and in the context of the verbs of speech, the general factual allows for davno to function as a component of the rheme but not the rheme proper (Ja davno tebja ne videl ‘I have not been seeing you for a long time’; My davno govorili, chto nasha zadacha — eto borjba s terrorismom ‘We have been insisting for a long time that our main goal is the struggle against terrorism’). 3) A specific type of questions with the initial davno (as well as with other adverbs with the meaning of a considerable quantity like chasto ‘often’, mnogo ‘much’, and daleko ‘far away’) is singled out. Such questions cannot be unambiguously classified either as yes-no-questions or as wh-questions (I davno vy zdesj stoite? ‘And how long are you staying here?’). A description of unique prosody of such questions is given. 4) In the context of discourse continuity, davno acquires the rising prosody which is in fact uncharacteristic of a word, which is unable be the theme (Xotel eto sdelat’ davno, no teperj sdelaju tochno ‘I wished to do it long ago, but now I will do it for sure’). The rising tone is accounted for by the meaning of continuity, which has the same prosody as the theme. 5) In constructions kogda-to davno ‘once upon a time’, ochenj davno ‘very long ago’, davno-davno ‘very long ago’, davnymdavno ‘very long ago’, dovoljno davno ‘quite long ago’, ne tak davno ‘not so long ago’ davno loses its rhematic polarity. The parameters of davno are exemplified by spoken fragments taken from the Multimodal corpus of the Russian National corpus, and the minor working collection of the Russian speech recordings specifically set up for this investigation. The software program Praat was used in the process of analyzing the sound data.