Parenthetical structures in typological perspective

Abstract

The article deals with the structures with epistemic modals — parenthetical questions and imperatives. A comparative study of a number of languages — Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, German, English, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese — was carried out focusing on parenthetical structures that include mental verbs. In addition, the study highlights the fact that in many cases, depending on the language pair in translation, parenthetical structures in a source language match matrix structures introducing clauses in a target language, and vice versa. Building on the bilingual corpora material the author proves that the Russian language is more likely to use parenthetical structures, while their translation equivalents appear to be either null or present matrix structures controlling a subordinate clause.