Functional approach to Russian discourse markers description

The relevance of the study is in the fact that modern Russian linguistic science has not developed a full-fledged description of Russian discursive words despite their frequency in Russian speech. The aim of the study is to describe the pragmatic functions of discursive words in the text. Frequent Russian discursive words expressing the degree of certainty (конечно ‘certainly’, естественно ‘naturally’, действительно ‘indeed’, безусловно ‘undoubtedly’, очевидно ‘obviously’, разумеется ‘of course’, etc.) served as the material for the study. The study is based on corpus data that allows us to analyze the discursive words frequency in different styles and speech genres and to draw conclusions about the functional features of these units. The data from different (sub)corpuses of Russian National Corpus were used in the article. The hypothesis of the study is that the discursive words in the text perform not only their main function (expression of confidence) but also various peripheral pragmatic functions. Peripheral functions are divided into two blocks; the first block helps to conduct a hidden dialog between the speaker and the listener (introduce a new topic, establish contact with the addressee, control the interlocutor’s attention, etc.), and the second block expresses emotions (including irony). The variety of functions is ensured by the semantic variability of discursive words. Based on corpus data, the authors give functional characteristics of this group of discursive words in terms of their frequency in different speech styles. The study substantiates the functional approach to describing discursive words. The subjective semantics of these discursive words, a hidden dialog between the speaker and the listener, is described. The theoretical result of the study is a scheme for describing the discursive words functionality. The scheme distinguishes the main and peripheral functions for different groups of discursive words. A promising direction is a detailed study of the functional features of other groups of discursive words in the aspect of their main and peripheral functions. The study is useful to all those who study or teach Russian language.