Replication Data for: The trajectory of the “Možno ja X?” construction: Variation in speech acts of request in contemporary Russian

This dataset concerns the data for the article that covers the topic of variation in speech acts of request with the modal word možno in Russian. I explore the ongoing language change in which the impersonal modal word možno ‘can, be possible’ takes a personal clause (možno + NOM) as its complement instead of the Experiencer in the Dative case (možno + DAT) and the infinitival clause in the speech act of request in Contemporary Russian. The corpus-based evidence reveals that the construction možno + DAT is gradually being replaced by možno + NOM. I discuss various syntactic and pragmatic factors such as verb class, aspect, transitivity and politeness strategies that motivate the choice of a modal construction. Methods of statistical modelling, used to sort out the most significant factors contributing to the choice of construction, show that the most important factor is the date of creation of the text.