From Editor-in-Chief

Abstract

Dear colleagues, authors and readers!

We dedicate this issue to modality – a linguistic category that has sustained linguists' attention for decades, continually yielding new insights and perspectives.

Several reasons prompted this thematic choice. The first is the 130th anniversary of V. V. Vinogradov's birth; his concept of modality has long been canonical, serving as the foundational starting point for scholars in the field. Incidentally, 75 years have passed since the publication of his first seminal article on the subject^[1]. Another occasion is the 80th birthday of Svetlana S. Vaulina^[2], a renowned modality researcher, and the “Vaulin Readings” conference held in her honor at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University – an event previously covered in our journal^[3]. Appropriately, this issue concludes with the “Scientific life: chronicle, reviews” section, featuring Zoya L. Novozhenova's review of the conference proceedings published in Kaliningrad.

The articles in this issue are grouped into two sections.

The first section, “Modality in Semantic Aspect,” brings together articles whose authors focus primarily on modal semantics while also considering other aspects of modal marker usage. The authors' observations cover various manifestations of modality.

Tatyana I. Steksova from Novosibirsk analyzes failure semantics as a constitutive feature of Russian semantic sentence types. Notably, she and her students have produced a comprehensive series describing various modal semantic sentence types (involuntary action, compulsion, success, etc.), demonstrating the high productivity of this approach to studying modality as a syntactic category.

Our St. Petersburg colleagues Vadim A. Belov and Valentina M. Belova, along with Elena S. Krupnova, present a corpus study of words they term “discourse words” in accordance with recent terminology, clarifying that this constitutes a broader class of markers than modal words alone. Examining their semantics, which is primarily associated with dialogicity, the authors analyze the frequency of each studied word and its contribution to utterance meaning. Highlighting increasing frequency trends, they trace usage dynamics and demonstrate functional differentiation across various subcorpora. This work effectively showcases novel approaches to modality and related linguistic markers.

 A distinct approach to modal semantics is presented by Larisa N. Kalinnikova and Margarita N. Zykova from Kaliningrad, who examine the linguistic consciousness of schoolchildren to uncover how they comprehend modal words such as dolzhen (“must”). Advocating for the possibility of reshaping students' conceptual understanding, the authors demonstrate the practical application of the resemantization method.

Together, these articles illustrate the diverse methodologies available for investigating modal semantics, employing both classical and contemporary techniques from linguistics and psycholinguistics.

The second section, “Modality Through Genre Prism,” scales up the inquiry by examining modality within specific generic frameworks.

Irina Yu. Kuksa from Kaliningrad immerses the reader in a historical context, analyzing texts from Russia's first newspaper, Vedomosti, which belong to what we would now classify as the informational genre. Conversely, Elena A. Lebedeva from Veliky Novgorod examines contemporary online texts, specifically English-language film reviews. While the historical study is methodologically grounded in grammatical-pragmatic frameworks and the contemporary one in stylistics, both authors share the conviction that genre dictates the deployment of modality and its expressive means. Their work convincingly demonstrates the productivity of analyzing modality at the textual level.

Overall, the articles in this issue confirm that modality – as the manifestation of the subject (speaker or author) within an utterance or text – continues to captivate researchers. This enduring interest is driven both by the dynamic nature of modality across diverse discursive conditions and by the ongoing search for novel analytical approaches and descriptive methods.

As always, it is a pleasure to conclude with expressions of gratitude.

I extend my sincere thanks to the contributors of this issue, whose enthusiastic participation has created a fascinating geographic spread – from Gdańsk and Kaliningrad to Novosibirsk, encompassing St. Petersburg and, of course, Veliky Novgorod.

Special gratitude goes to our reviewers: Victoria G. Didkovskaya from Veliky Novgorod, Vadim A. Belov from St. Petersburg, and Tatyana M. Shkapenko from Kaliningrad, all Doctors of Philology.

Until we meet again on the digital pages of our journal!

^[1] Vinogradov V. V. (1950). On the category of modality and modal words in Russian. Proceedings of the Institute of the Russian Language. Vol. 2 (pp. 38–79). Moscow, Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences Publ. The article was later reprinted in the book: Vinogradov V. V. (1975). Selected works: studies in Russian grammar (pp. 53–87). Moscow: Nauka. The concept of modality is also presented in his comprehensive work: Vinogradov V. V. (1972). The Russian language: grammatical theory of the word. 2nd ed. Moscow: Vysshaya Shkola, in the section “Modal words and particles: their categories” (pp. 568–583). I have previously had the occasion to draw attention to the significance of these works for the study of modality: Shmeleva T. V. (1983). V. V. Vinogradov's thoughts on modality and the further study of this semantic category. Zbornik radova instituta za strane jezike i književnosti, 5, 73–81.

^[2] It is important to note that to mark the anniversary, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University reprinted Svetlana S. Vaulina's work: Vaulina S. S. (2026). Evolution of the means of expressing modality in the Russian language (11th–17th centuries): monograph (reprint edition). Kaliningrad: Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University Publ. 160 pp. This book was first published in 1988 by Leningrad University, where Svetlana S. Vaulina defended her doctoral dissertation in 1991. The reprint opens with an essay on her academic career: Kuksa I. Yu. The energy of love is invincible: in memory of a scholar, mentor, and supervisor (in lieu of a preface) (pp. III–XI).

^[3] Kuksa I. Yu., & Tkachenko A. I. (2025). Facets of modality: First Vaulina readings in Kaliningrad. VERBA. North-West linguistic journal, 4(18), 82–87. https://doi.org/10.34680/VERBA-2025-4(18)-82-87