Predicative Pragmatic Markers in Russian Oral Spontaneous Speech: Formal Types and Realizations

The article describes the main formal types of predicative pragmatic markers (PPM) in Russian spontaneous oral speech. The paper suggests the typology of PPMs on the material of Speech Corpus of Russian Everyday Communication “One Day of Speech” and the corpus of monologues “Balanced Annotated Collection of Texts”. The approach to the PPMs’ description implies taking into consideration the syntactic structure of examined units. The whole class of pragmatic markers can be divided into 3 groups: one-word markers (tam, vot, eto, kak by), word markers consisting of two or more words (i vsyo takoye procheye, eto samoye, tipa togo chto), and so-called formally predicative markers (skazhem tak, (ya) ne znayu, znayesh/te). The class of predicative pragmatic markers is heterogeneous since it includes markers originated from different clauses which have already passed the pragmaticalization process or which are passing it now.
The suggested typology covers 3 groups of PPMs sorted according to the form of predicativity: formally full PPMs (ponimayesh/te, (ya) (ne) dumayu (chto), tak skazhem), formally incomplete PPMs (kak eto <nazvat’, skazat’>, chto yeshchyo <skazat’>), and PPMs with the secondary predicativity (koroche (govorya), sobstvenno (govorya), etc.). The analysis of the corpus material shows that the class of pragmatic markers is extremely diverse, and that it is possible to classify the markers based on functional or formal aspect.