Particle chai in One East Middle Russian Dialect

The paper attempts to describe the functions of a Russian particle chai in the dialect of Krasnaya Luka village in Lyskovo district, Nizhny Novgorod region, that belongs to East Middle Russian dialects with okanye (Vladimir-Volga group). The data includes 8 hours of interviews with older inhabitants, from which 102 contexts with the particle chai were allocated. In the linguistic literature the particle is underrepresented, and its functions have not been fully researched yet. In our research we propose the following parameters of meaning: 1) the awareness of the addressee, 2) epistemic modality, 3) cause, 4) consequence, 5) continuation and development of the topic, 6) use in imperative context. In the study the exact Fisher’s test was applied and showed the statistical significance of the first three (most frequent) parameters for the presence of the particle in a statement. Since the particle is present not only in the dialects, but also in modern standard Russian, we decided to compare its usage in the dialect under research and in the National Russian Corpus since 1950. The main difference turned out to be the construction chai ne plus noun phrase in the corpus, that was not attested in the dialect, and also the fact that the particle is more frequent in interrogative and modal contexts.