Allegedly Yakupov

So this is the story. Everyone probably remembers the recent incident with the unfortunate professor Ryabov, who taught children at the Central Musical School to play the piano, and then one girl did not receive the first place hoped for by her mother in some competition, but only second, and then the mother took her daughter away with a scandal from the professor, and then came back with flowers, but he didn’t take the flowers and the girl back either, and then the mother accused him of molesting her daughter for a long time. And they would have put the poor fellow in prison, probably, if not for the noise raised by the public, not for the support of the students, and not for the video that ended up on the Internet, where a careerist investigator conspires with a shady mother, how they could put the professor in jail better. The jury acquitted him, and he, half-dead, almost fell out of the courthouse into the arms of those greeting him.

But this story has different branches and continuations. Thus, the former director of the Central Music School, a certain Yakupov, who at one time apparently played some role in this story, filed claims for the protection of honor and dignity against the media, demanding some fabulous money as compensation for moral damage. The reason was the following fragment: “The testimony of the main witness for the prosecution - the director, now former, of the Central Music School A. N. Yakupov - initially consisted of a list of alleged episodes of parents turning to him. With complaints about Ryabov’s pedophilic behavior over the past three years” ( http://grani.ru/blogs/free/entries/190417.html ).

The essence of the claim is that the word allegedly indicates that the witness told a lie in court, that is, committed an immoral and illegal act, and this is defamatory information. A million - to the studio.

This is a rather rare case when a purely linguistic incident is at the heart of a court case. And that's what I mean. When considering civil claims for the protection of honor and dignity, the courts rely on Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated February 24, 2005 No. 3 “On judicial practice in cases of protecting the honor and dignity of citizens, as well as the business reputation of citizens and legal entities” ( www. rg.ru/2005/03/15/verhovniy-sud-dok.html ). Its essence, in short, is that a citizen must be compensated for the damage caused by the dissemination of defamatory information about him, which is considered to be false information about his committing immoral or illegal acts, and this information must be “in the form of a statement.” That is, not opinions, not assumptions, but only statements. Freedom of speech is still true - opinions, even erroneous ones, are not yet prohibited by law in our country.

And now, attention, the question: does the word supposedly mean that the speaker claims that what is being said is not true, or that he thinks/assumes so.

Supposedly it belongs to the number of indicators of someone else's speech - such as they say . Such words show that the speaker in this part of his speech is retelling or quoting another person. At the same time , it supposedly actually expresses a critical assessment of someone else’s statement or some part of it. In dictionaries, this word is interpreted in the sense that it “expresses doubt about the reliability of what is being reported,” “indicates the conjecture of the statement, doubt about its reliability.” In other words, meaning does not supposedly include a hidden statement about the falsity of a given statement, but only a doubt about its reliability. That is, it supposedly expresses a certain opinion of the speaker.

Well, let's say dictionaries can be inaccurate. If we turn to linguistic research, we will see that there, too, meaning is supposedly defined as an opinion about the falsity of someone else’s statement. So that this thesis does not look like “English scientists have proven it,” I will refer to at least one work - the article by V. A. Plungjan “On indicators of foreign speech and unreliability in the Russian language: supposedly others” // B. Wiemer & V. A. Plungjan . (Hrsg.). “Lexikalische Evidenzialitats-Marker in slavischen Sprachen.” (Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 72. Munchen: Sagner, 2008, 285-311).

But let’s not rely on authorities, let’s look at a few examples taken from the National Corpus of the Russian Language (ruscorpora.ru):

From Mauthausen there were rumors of an uprising in which many prisoners died. The uprising occurred before the arrival of American troops. There were no details, there were no lists of the dead, but someone allegedly saw how Foma was killed during a shootout. It was not possible to find out who, what. [D. Granin. Bison (1987)].

As is easy to see, it is not at all stated here that Thomas was not actually killed; it is only said that it is not possible to find witnesses who could confirm the fact and circumstances of his death.

Perhaps this is still a story, and not a human document. But I tried to preserve all the author’s motivations - this is exactly how he supposedly thought and acted. These were supposedly his motives. Please note: “supposedly.” To what extent this is correct, I don’t know at all now. “That’s why I sell it for what I bought it for.” [YU. Dombrovsky. Guardian of Antiquities / Appendix (1964)].

Here the author specifically draws attention to the word allegedly, indicating that he does not know whether this was the case, but not at all claiming that it was not so.

There was another version: supposedly Pavel’s wife Irina fell in love with Leonid and was ready to leave her husband for him. In general, the story is dark. [A. Slapovsky. Big Book of Changes // Volga, 2010].

Here the word is supposedly connected with the word version (i.e., an assumption about the causes and sequence of any events), and in addition, the author specifically explains that the story is dark - that is, it is not stated in any way that in reality this was not the case one way or another.

Thus, both the interpretation of the word supposedly in dictionaries, and its explication in linguistic works, and the study of examples show that the word supposedly does not express a hidden statement about the falsity of the statement, but expresses the speaker’s opinion that this statement may be false.

Therefore, the combination of alleged episodes of parental contacts to him should be interpreted not as a hidden statement that in reality there were no such appeals, but only as the subjective opinion of the speaker, consisting in the fact that he is not sure that such appeals actually took place .

Please take the million from the studio.

Irina Levontina