Discursive Markers-Regulators of Communication (po)slušaj, (po)smotri, (po)stoj and Their Usage Characteristics

The paper deals with the verbs (po)slušat’, (po)smotret’, (po)stoyat’ in the imperative 2Sg and 2Pl, which have lost their lexical meaning in dialog and passed into the category of discourse markers (DM). As DM these words they can have a variety of functions regulating the interaction between the participants of communication: attracting the interlocutor’s attention, switching the topic of conversation, capturing the order of speaking, anticipating a conclusion, etc. In the literature, the inventory of the functions of such units is described in some detail, but there is still no contrastive description of the specifi c use of the imperatives in question — this is the main purpose of this article. The characteristic feature for all the DMs under consideration is the initial position in the dialogue turn. In this position (po)slušaj, (po)smotri, (po)stoj primarily have the function of capturing the order of speaking, which is combined with the function of attracting attention. In this case, the DMs slušaj and stoj can introduce any utterance, while smotri usually precedes explanation or reasoning. The most autonomous in terms of movement within a single utterance is the DM (po)slušaj, which seems to be explained by the fact that, due to its higher frequency, this DM has desemantized more than the others and has acquired more discourse functions. The article also describes other properties of the DMs under consideration: their ability to be repeated within an utterance, the correlation of their functions with prosodic characteristics (e.g., the possibility of pronunciation with streched vowels), their ability to express any emotion, etc. This study thus advances the qualitative differentiation of communication regulators.