The Intensifier oчень in Russian Academic Discourse

Abstract

The category of intensity is a complex entity that allows expressing the emotions of a person, his evaluation of phenomena and have an impact on a reader. That is the reason for this category to become the focus of attention for many linguists. However, the verbalization of intensity in different types of discourse is not the same. The purpose of the article is to study the category of intensity in Russian academic discourse via studying the functioning of the intensifier очень. The research material was obtained from scientific articles presented in Russian open access journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. The corpus constructed of selected articles was analysed by means of Lancaster University software. The attention was paid to the application of various measures used in corpus linguistics to identify the nature of relations between different collocates. The analysis allowed to present the grammatical features of the intensifiers in academic discourse, to consider their collocations by the example of the intensifier очень, and to propose the model for describing linguistic phenomena using corpus-based studies.