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“Murzik, Are You Happy?”: Emotional Variation in Everyday Youth Speech in Relation to Speakers’ Social Roles
This paper presents a pilot study of lexical means used to express emotion in spontaneous speech in relation to speakers’ social roles. The study is based on an experimental sample of transcripts from the Everyday Student Conversations corpus (ESC), comprising 135 communicative episodes and 281,638 word tokens. It examines patterns in the use of emotional and evaluative lexis in frequent social-role situations, including conversations with friends, classmates, parents, pets, and oneself. For the quantitative analysis, we combine three Russian sentiment dictionaries: RuSentiLex, PolSentiLex, and KartaSlovSent. The resulting lexicon contains 9,233 emotional and evaluative words. The findings show that the proportion of positive vocabulary varies systematically depending on the speaker’s social role. It is highest in self-directed speech (63.8%), followed by communication with university classmates (56.0%), parents (55.6%), and pets (53.6%). Conversations between friends show the lowest proportion of positive vocabulary: 49.7% between female friends and 47.9% between male friends. Our data also suggest that obscene vocabulary in youth speech may serve not only to express negative emotions, but also to signal solidarity and informal closeness between speakers. The results contribute to the description of the lexical and semantic features of spontaneous spoken communication and point to further research on the sociolinguistic variation of everyday emotions in Russian speech.