Pragmatic markers in the aspect of communicative alignment

Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 2: Языкознание. 2020. Vol. 19. No. 3. P. 49–58.

Трощенкова Е. В., Blinova O. V.

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.

Keywords: communication, pragmatic markers, communicative alignment, Russian everyday speech, spontaneous dialogue