Category of person and the semantics of emotive parentheses (on the example of the parenthetical phrases k udivleniyu, k sozhaleniyu, k neschast’yu / English surprisingly, regrettably, unfortunately)

The article examines the semantic potential of the syntactic category of person in parenthetical constructions verbalising the emotive modus. As a result of a comparative analysis of three parentheses derived from the prepositional noun phrase к + Dat. case (k udivleniyu, k sozhaleniyu, k neschast’yu / English surprisingly, regrettably, unfortunately), we established that their combinability properties depend on the following semantic features. The first one is their semantic hybridity, i. e., the presence of not only a modus but also a dictum component in the semantics. The second characteristic is the semantic type of the modus component (emotive proper, emotive verbal, and emotive evaluative). The analysis of quantitative data obtained from the Russian National Corpus and speech material from Internet resources indicates different semantic-syntactic and functional-textual potential of the specified parentheses. The quantitative analysis is accompanied by textual analysis and semantic and pragmatic interpretation. When analysing the material, we gave meticulous attention to the presence/absence of means expressing personal and possessive pronouns or nouns denoting experiencer in the emotive parenthetic constructions. Thus, the study discovers a quantitative relationship between the 1st and 3rd persons, identifies and pragmatically explains the uncharacteristic nature of the 2nd person of the subject. Moreover, the study compares the implicit and explicit ways of experience representation and establishes different significance of the latter for each of the three parentheses. We interpreted the use of the 2nd person of experiencer as a special speech tactic which results in a deviation from the speech etiquette norms. The article analysed extracts from texts of different types and genres, which enabled us to discover the textual functions performed by grammatical person of experiencer of the emotive parenthetical constructions. The category of person presents different interrelations between the experiencer and the speaker/narrator, i. e., from coincidence to distancing (including along the timeline).