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Позиционные свойства русских усеченных обращений и дискурсивных маркеров типа 'слушай'
The paper tests the hypothesis of positional similarity between truncated vocative forms (TVFs) like mam, pap, Tan’ (instead of, respectively, mama ‘mom’, papa ‘dad’, Tanya) and discourse markers (DMs) of the type “slushay”, “poslushay” (lit. ‘listen.2.Imp’). The hypothesis is based on the functional similarity of these expressions that belong to a wide category of parentheticals and show similar patterns of syntactic and (presumably) prosodic incorporation into
host phrases. The most signifi cant difference between TVFs and listen-DMs in functional terms is the ability of TVFs to name addressees; listen-DMs do not identify the addressee and therefore cannot be used for “remote calls” where the speaker and the listener are separated from each other by distance or otherwise.
Two samples of utterances from the “Оne Speaker’s Day” subcorpus (containing around 898 000 tokens) were taken: with 712 TVF utterances, and with 692 DM utterances, respectively. The relative frequency of TVFs is 808,91 ipm, and the relative frequency of DMs is 769,96 ipm. The study classifies the vocative forms by their “initial”, “middle”, or “final” positions in the utterance. Initial positions seem to prevail in both samples with over 50 % for truncated vocative forms, and around 68 % for DMs. Although both samples show the same in-the-utterance position pattern in the order of diminishing frequency (initial > middle > final), the similarity hypothesis was not statistically validated.
The differences between TVFs and listen-DMs are noticeable in the first place in the share of parenthetical uses in the final and middle positions. The share of TVFs in the final position is about 19 % against about 3 % for listen-DMs. For a more meaningful assessment of the observed differences, an analysis of utterances with parentheticals in dialogues is required. Utterances with TVFs in the fi nal position represent statements, questions, or directives. No interrogatives or directives have been registered in utterances with final listen-DMs.