Modal words as a special part of speech

Doklady Bashkirskogo Universiteta. 2022. Volume 7. No. 6. pp. 378-388.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33184/dokbsu-2022.6.5

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The question of the morphological status of modal words (whether they are an independent part of speech) and their place in the system of parts of speech in the Russian language (are included in the group of significant or in the group of service parts of speech) is one of the still not finally resolved in linguistics, including educational, literature. The article attempts to make some clarifications to the content and features of modal words in Russian and to resolve this controversial issue primarily for educational purposes. Modal words have their own specific semantic, morphological and syntactic features, which gives reason to single them out as an independent part of speech. The uniqueness of these features distinguishes modal words from both significant and auxiliary parts of speech and allows us to recognize them as a special part of speech. By origin and lexical composition, most modal words are lexicalized (“frozen”) word forms of significant parts of speech and are their functional homonyms. Modal words are not members of the sentence and are not associated with any member, they function as introductory words and are included in the sentence as a specific component, different from the traditional members of the sentence, in a way of a special, introductive connection.