St Petersburg University philologists compile unique dictionary of pragmatic markers in everyday speech
Philologists at St Petersburg University have discovered that the words most frequently used in speech are devoid of meaning and perform such functions as filling in gaps and attributing heightened emotion to a phrase.
We live in a conversational world, one in which we speak and listen much more often than we read and write. Philology has traditionally been based on the study of written language, leaving the spoken word in the shadows. With the appearance of spoken corpora, however, it has turned out that what is recorded in grammatical and literary examples is but a small part of what is actually contained in our native speech.
This study is based on two speech corpora – the Balanced Annotated Text Library (SAT) and One Speech Day (ORD), both of which have been developed at St Petersburg University and replenished for more than 20 years.
Research has shown that among the first 150 most frequently occurring words in the Russian language, there is not a single noun. As for verbs, the only one on the list is ‘znayu’ (‘I know’), even then simply as part of the collocation ‘ne znayu’ (‘I dunno’) and neither as an action nor in the function of a verb (for example, in the phrase, ‘On / ne znaju / voobshchay ochin stranni’ (‘He’s / I dunno / actually very strange’). The most frequent elements of our oral discourse are, strangely enough, ‘eh’ (‘um’), ‘ah’ (‘uh’) and other vocal units that we use to help express our thoughts, to add emotion to them or to sustain a pause. And these elements occur much more frequently than ‘mama’ (‘momma’), ‘papa’ (‘poppa’), ‘prishol’ (‘I came’) or ‘skazal’ (‘I said’).
The team of researchers is headed by Natalia Bogdanova-Beglarian, Professor in the Department of Russian Language at St Petersburg University. The researchers have found around 60 such units in spoken Russian and called them pragmatic markers, i.e. functional units of speech that have lost their original lexical or grammatical meaning but still perform certain functions in conversation.
‘Let’s say you need to break an appointment,’ Professor Bogdanova-Beglarian provides an example. ‘Well, you are unlikely to use precisely those words. It will probably come out something like this: “Ya ne znayu…tam eto…pojalui, nu eto samoe…naverno, ne pridu” (“I dunno…like… uh…maybe… whatchamacallit… I don’t think I’ll come.”) And that’s a simulation of just one phrase. There are whole texts like this that have been captured in recent corpora.
These vocal units do not fit into the standard patterns found in textbooks and grammar books. They are, however, interspersed throughout a conversation. Some call them particles and others, discourse markers. It is difficult for scholars to call them full-fledged words because for a philologist a word is a unity of characters and meaning. However, in the constructions ‘nu kak yevo’ (‘well, how can I put it?’) and ‘eto samoe’ (‘whatchamacallit’), what is more important is not the meaning, which is practically non-existent, but the function that they perform. Just the same, these are the most frequent units in spoken Russian and these scholars contend that they definitely need to be studied.
We have created a dictionary of pragmatic markers, which is a collection of linguistic essays. We have described each marker, along with quantitative data, examples and an analysis of experiments. This is a unique publication, the likes of which cannot be found either here in Russia or abroad.
Natalia Bogdanova-Beglarian, Professor in the Department of Russian Language at St Petersburg University
The results of this research are very important for translators, who come up against the need to correctly render a text written in Russian that contains colloquial language. If they remove all of the so-called verbal trash, then they end up with a different speech portrait of a character and they are forced to look for equivalents of these vocal units in the other language. Research has already been initiated along these lines at St Petersburg University, and initial studies have been undertaken based on material from the Chinese and Finnish languages.
Work on the monograph dictionary went on for several years and was supported at different stages by different research funds. It is designed to help people in the creative professions and is an asset when it comes to creating a speech portrait of a character in a work of fiction.
Taking their lead from Sergei Dovlatov and Vasily Shukshin, our writers try to make their characters speak naturally, but they draw only upon their own notion of the characters and their feel for the language.
Natalia Bogdanova-Beglarian, Professor in the Department of Russian Language at St Petersburg University
Now, writers and screenwriters will be able to consult this dictionary and determine how a person of a certain age, gender, profession and level of education speaks.
This reference book is already in demand among teachers of Russian as a second language. So that foreign students do not get lost in our spontaneous discourse but will learn how to understand it, their teachers have started using the dictionary of pragmatic markers. A foreigner may learn Russian in their home country to the point where they speak and write at a good level, but when they come to Russia and have to contend with the everyday language, they cannot understand what they hear. ‘They will turn to a traditional dictionary, but they won’t find our most frequently occurring constructions there,’ notes Professor Bogdanova-Beglarian. ‘If the student tries to decipher each unit literally, they will not be able to make any sense out of our “On, mm, kak yevo tam, Petya” (“He, uh, whatisname, Petya”) or “eh, ne znayu kak” (“um, I dunno how”).’
The use of this dictionary of markers to optimise Artificial Intelligence and, in Forensic Linguistics, to construct a speech portrait of a person, is promising. There are also plans at the University to investigate the connection between pragmatic markers and prosody, i.e. the changes in intonation when these markers are pronounced. The field of applications for such dictionaries is extremely broad, so our team of linguists will continue to work on developing this resource.