Pragmatic Markers of Russian Everyday Speech: the Revised Typology and Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

Pragmatic markers (PMs) mainly have an influence on a pragmatic aspect of communication and are mostly devoid of their own referential meaning. These markers are indispensable elements of oral communication in any language. The article suggests a typology of pragmatic markers for Russian everyday speech that includes 10 basic types. The frequency study for the use of various marker types is carried out on the basis of two representative speech corpora – a corpus of Russian Everyday Speech “One Speech Day” (ORD) and “Balanced Annotated Collection of Texts” (SAT). Preliminary data about PM distribution in dialogues and monologues was obtained and the article describes the main difficulties one comes across while annotating PMs according to our methodology. The main requirements for creating a Dictionary of Pragmatic Markers are enumerated. The paper indicates the scope of pragmatic markers and further prospects for their use, which includes (but not limited to) datasets labelling for voice assistants and speech recognition systems development.

Keywords

• nlp
• spoken discourse
• speech technologies
• pragmatics
• pragmatic markers
• russian
• corpus linguistics