SO, IN RUSSIAN, THEY SAY SO: THE INTRODUCTORY PHRASE STALO BYT’ (MEANING ‘SO’) IN RUSSIAN

The article describes the linguistic behavior of the introductory phrase stalo byt’ (literally became to be, roughly meaning ‘so’) in the Russian language of the XVIII–XXI centuries. The data from the Russian National Corpus show that this construction WAS acquiring additional senses throughout centuries. First it was used as a cause and consequence marker, then it developed two more discourse meanings, Namely of a paraphrase and of returning to the previous topic. Our data show that this development is correlated with the increasing use of stalo byt’in dialogues. In the Russian language of the XVIII–XIX centuries there was a variant of stalobyt’, a single introductory word stalo (literally became), the difference between the constructions being rather stylistic than grammatical. Stalo, while being the most preferable and prestigious in the language of the XVIII century, by the beginning of the XIX century became to sound archaic and thus vernacular. Finally, by the end of the XIX century the parenthetical stalo almost disappeared. We suppose that this kind of semantic development from the circumstantial role marker to a discourse coherency means must be characteristic not only of the construction under consideration, but of a more general class of lexical items as well, and we plan to do some further research on it.