Pragmatic Markers of Russian Everyday Speech: Invariants in Dialogue and Monologue

Abstract

The paper presents the distribution of pragmatic markers (PM) of Russian everyday speech in two types of discourse: dialogical and monologic. PMs are an essential part of any oral discourse, therefore, quantitative data on their distribution are necessary for solving both theoretical and practical tasks related to studies of speech communication, as well as for translation and teaching Russian as a foreign language. The article describes samples from two speech corpora: “One Speaker’s Day” (ORD corpus, consisting of mostly dialogue speech, the annotated subcorpus containing 321 504 tokens) and “Balanced Annotated Text Library” (SAT corpus, which consists only of monologues, the annotated subcorpus containing 50 128 tokens). Besides, it presents statistical data of PM distributions obtained for 60 basic (invariant) markers, PMs common in both dialogue and monologue (for example, hesitative marker such as vot, tam, tak) are identified, as well as those that are more typical for monologues (boundary markers like znachit, nu vot, vs’o) or dialogues (‘xeno’-markers like takoj, grit; and meta-communicative markers vidish’, (ja) ne znaju). Special attention is paid to PMs usage both in different communication situations and in speech of different sociolects.