An Explication of the Concept of Modesty in Polish and Russian: A Corpus-Based Approach

Abstract

The concept of modesty is a fragment of the linguistic worldview, reflecting a particular way of interpreting reality through language shaped by linguaculture. Modesty belongs to the class of abstract concepts that characterize human attitudes and emotions. Such concepts are often marked by ambiguity and a clear evaluative dimension, associated with the positive or negative judgment of the statement’s author. The complexity of meaning is underscored by the intricate yet similar etymological roots of the synonymous chain modest – modestly – modesty. Both traditional lexicographic sources and modern electronic dictionaries identify several distinct meanings of modesty in their entries.

This paper explores the similarities and differences in the meanings of modesty in Polish and Russian. Using corpus linguistics tools, collocations of the adverb modestly were extracted from Polish and Russian corpora, with particular attention to combinations with participial verb forms. These collocations were then categorized into semantic groups based on their contextual use. Finally, the study compared the meanings of modesty in Polish and Russian derived through this method.

The analysis revealed two key findings: first, a clear dominance of collocations forming metatextual formulas in the corpus data, and second, a preserved semantic similarity in Polish and Russian collocations.