V nature, po zhizni, v reale, po faktu: new markers of authenticity

The paper examines new discourse markers of authenticity expressing epistemic modality that have come into use in the Russian language over the past three decades and still lack a detailed scholarly description. Drawing on the data from the Russian National Corpus, the author analyzes their semantic features as well as common usage patterns. Among them, a combination of ‘authenticity’ and ‘confidence’ semes common for all the discourse markers of authenticity is pointed out, along with a frequent trend towards semantic bleaching and pragmaticalization. In dictionaries, these markers tend to be defined with reference to other, more central, members of the group. They are often treated as polysemic, due to the grammatical and semantic heterogeneity of contexts in which the markers occur. However, such categorization often fails because of the blurred boundaries between meanings. The yearly distribution chart (a Russian National Corpus tool) demonstrates a high mobility of the markers concerned which calls for their prompt and comprehensive description.