ИСТИНА

This paper is aimed to analyze the Russian equivalents of the Italian focus particle "magari". This lexeme has attracted much attention among linguists from different countries due to its especially intriguing polyfunctionality that sometimes knows no parallel in other languages. Russian equivalents of "magari" (extracted from the Russian-Italian subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus) clearly demonstrate that "magari" corresponds in Russian to a wide range of lexemes/units with different modality - equipotential non exclusion of factuality, concessivity, weakening of the illocutionary force of imperative, optative modality. The set of functions held by "magari" (non factual, non factual concessive, imperative, optative) also recalls in Russian the semantic network developed by several irrealis markers of non factuality. Moreover, in some contexts in the Italian translations from Russian "magari" appears while there is no concrete equivalent in the source language. In other words, the connotative range of "magari" is mostly achieved in Russian by different semantic mechanisms. Cross-linguistic analysis helps in clarifying the set of interlinguistic Russian-Italian correspondences of the lexeme "magari" and in circumscribing the different constructions and contexts where it occurs.