The Function of Metacommunicative Markers in Russian-Speaking Communication (a Sociolinguistic Aspect)

Communication studies. 2021. Vol. 8. No. 3. P. 454–464.

T.I. Popova

The article considers the use of metacommunicative pragmatic markers in the gender aspect, taking into account the social roles of the speaker. The research is carried out on the data of ORD corpus Russian Everyday Speech known as “One Speaker’s Day” corpus, based on transcripts of audio recordings obtained under actual conditions. The volume of the subsample is about 200,000 words. It features episodes of “speech days” by 15 women and 15 men of three age groups. The informants act in various social roles, opposed by the principle of symmetry/asymmetry. Pragmatic annotation of the material and further discursive analysis presented that metacommunication is actively used in the speech of speakers, but it is much more in the speech of women. At the same time, men use markers of this type (slushai / davai segodnya / (m...m) v tishine provedyom den', potom na golodnyi zheludok eyo luchshe ne est' / znaesh') with specific speech tasks, for example, as a refusal (slushai / u menya net deneg), and in the speech of women the variability of metacommunicative markers is wider, but functional diversity is not observed. One of the features of Russian-speaking communication is the tendency to cooperate and maintain a dialogue in woman speech. From the point of view of feminist linguistics, this feature is directly related to the issues of the dependent position of a woman, since it records her passivity and the habit of yielding. There is a special form of language that is used only by women in some ethnic groups. However, it should be noted that more than half of the identified uses relate to the speech of women in the older age group (from 55 years), communicating with relatives and friends, while metacommunicative pragmatic markers become multifunctional and also act as a starting marker in the speech of representatives of the younger age group.

Keywords: sociolinguistics, gender linguistics, pragmatic markers