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Побудительные реплики и их компоненты в русском устном диалоге: количественное описание
The paper analyses imperative utterances using a subcorpus of 239500 words from the “One Day of Speech” corpus (further referred to as ORD). The article covers only utterances with the 2 nd person Sg and Pl forms of the verb in the
imperative mood. There are 2353 verb forms of this kind and 2025 utterances that contain them. Each imperative utterance is viewed as a sequence of components that consists of a core component (an imperative or an imperative construction) and “meaningful components,” i.e., components that are regularly used in imperative utterances and often shift the utterance along the politeness/impoliteness scale and categoricity/non-categoricity scale.
Among meaningful components the following are common:
- forms of address;
- personal pronouns;
- particles davaj, davajte [let’s], nu, -ka, že, na, a, da, vot, prosto and their combinations;
- politeness formulae, explicit request markers such as prošu tebja [I ask you];
- various verbal modifiers, including downgraders nemnožko [a bit], tichonečko [slowly, carefully]) and intensifiers bystro [quickly], sročno [urgently], objazatel’no [necessarily], sejčas že [now], uže [already], nakonec [at last] and others;
- emotive interjections;
- imperative interjections.
According to the ORD data, there are 10 verbs most frequently used in the imperative mood (2 nd person Sg or Pl): slušat’ [listen] (ipm 1048,20), smotret’ [look] (ipm 651,47), podoždat’ [wait] (ipm 488,60), skazat’ [say] (ipm 363,32),
izvinit’ [excuse] (ipm 267,27), dat’ [give, perfect verb] (ipm 263,09), idti [go] (ipm 250,57), posmotret’ [look, verb with a prefix] (ipm 233,86), davat’ [give, imperfect verb] (ipm 171,22), vzjat’ [take] (ipm 146,16). Thus, imperative utterances dialogue most contain verbs that regulate spoken interaction: verbs that establish contact and attract the listener’s attention (slušat’, smotret’, posmotret’ [listen, look]); the verb podoždat’ [wait] that is mostly used to convey the meanings ‘don’t start speaking’ and ‘stop speaking for a while’, verbs of saying (skazat’, govorit’ [say, speak]).
Some other meaningful components are: references to the ongoing/completed speech act (the present and past indicative forms of the 1 st person from the verbs govorit’ [speak], skazat’ [say], povtorjat’ [repeat] and others); lexical
means of diminishing the strength and authoritativeness of the utterance that express suppositions (downtoners such as možet byt’, možet [maybe, perhaps]); lexical means of diminishing the strength and authoritativeness of the utter-
ance that express uncertainty (hedges such as kak by [sort of]); expressions that explain the reasons of action (grounders); “appealers” such as da? ladno? chorošo?.
The following features are taken into account in the description of imperative utterances: the number of its meaningful components, their positions in the imperative utterance, their positions with respect to the core component
of the utterance; presence of iterations, co-occurrence of the meaningful components in the utterance.
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