Abstract
The article presents a model of communicative alignment in pragmatic markers (PM) use in Russian everyday dialogical communication. The main objectives are to check whether speakers coordinate their linguistic behavior not just with the use of lexemes or grammar forms or constructions, but also with PMs and how this actually works. We suppose that the use of PM by one of the speakers in the dialogue may increase the chances that the same PM will be used by the other speaker. In a Russian speech corpus "One Day of Speech" there were found 57 macro-episodes of communication where the PM koroche / koroche govorya was used by multiple speakers (46 episodes with 2 speakers using the PM, 11 – with 3 speakers). The analysis of PM use applying the system of quantitative parameters, worked out by the authors, has enabled them to note, that medium frequency of PM use rises when the number of speakers increases. PM used by speaker 1 is repeated by speaker 2, thus inducing speaker 3 to use the same PM, which influences the speech of the first two speakers respectively. The data analysis allows us to conclude that the original hypothesis of alignment in PMs has been proved for the marker we studied.
Highlights
Corpus-based research of pragmatic markers in Russian has been so far focused on theoretical issues concerning defining PMs as a specific class of linguistic units, creating methodology for their annotation and their typology, describing different classes from a functional point of view as well as statistically in terms of the frequency of their use
Let us look separately at the macro-episodes where the PM was used by two speakers (MacroEpisodes2) and those where the PM is used by three speakers (Macro-Episodes3)
In our data together speakers tend to use koroche / koroche govorya more often than in Macro-Episodes1. This leads to the idea that the frequency of the PM use may be rooted in the individual preferences of a particular speaker or the way it suits a particular situation in speaking, fulfilling its pragmatic marker functions, but is influenced by alignment effects with the speakers tuning their contributions with regards to PM use to each other
Summary
Corpus-based research of pragmatic markers (hereafter PMs) in Russian has been so far focused on theoretical issues concerning defining PMs as a specific class of linguistic units, creating methodology for their annotation and their typology, describing different classes from a functional point of view as well as statistically in terms of the frequency of their use. This research, being grounded on the previous results in this sphere, introduces a slightly different view, as it is interested not in individual uses of a PM by a single speaker, but considers usages of the same PM by two or more interlocutors in a coherent dialogue. The article describes a methodology for analyzing communicative alignment in PMs as applied to spontaneous Russian oral dialogical discourse. The developed methods were applied to the research of one Russian pragmatic marker, that of koroche / koroche govorya (in short / briefly speaking) and an initial quantitative analysis of the dialogues was performed, so that the general fact of alignment could be verified and the specific aspects of the phenomenon could be discussed
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