Realization Features of the Pragmatic Marker Kak Ego (Eyo/Ikh) in Oral Spontaneous Speech (Prosodic and Sociolinguistic Aspects)

The article is devoted to the description of the lexicalized construction kak ego (eyo/ikh), which belongs to the class of pragmatic hesitation markers and is used in spontaneous speech in situations of hesitation and hesitation search. The material for the study consists 108 contexts, including this construction, identified in the speech of 52 speakers from the corpus of Russian everyday communication “One Day of Speech”. Instrumental analysis showed that the prosody of the pragmatic marker kak ego (eyo/ikh) is characterized by a decrease in intensity and voice pitch frequency, compared to the average value of the speaker’s pitch frequency. This marker is typically used in the context of hesitation pauses as part of more extended hesitation structures. The realization of the marker kak ego (eyo/ikh) in speech is individual, depending on the speech preferences of a particular native speaker and exhibits intonational variations across speakers, which are described in this study. The results of the study form the sociolinguistic perspective showed that the appearance of the pragmatic marker kak ego (eyo/ikh) in speech is influenced by the age of the speaker and the level of their speech competence, while no gender-based differences in the use of the unit were found.