VOT ÉTO DA! SOME REMARKS ON ASSESSMENT IN RUSSIAN

Abstract

This article investigates assessment in Russian as a type of social action by using the approach to linguistic relativity where the diversity of lexicosyntactic resources available to the speakers of natural languages brings about different collateral effects to the social act of assessment. An analysis of selected samples of a Russian spoken corpus presented in this paper shows that specific lexicosyntactic resources available to the speakers of Russian, such as flexible word order and particles (e.g. da, nu, vot, to), have specific collateral effects. In addition to building agreement in assessment, these lexicosyntactic resources (i) create the context of closeness where more can be said with less overtly expressed linguistic means, and (ii) intensify the social act of assessment by making it more emotionally charged.

Keywords

• spoken language
• colloquial speech studies
• assessment as social action
• linguistic relativity