Search
Submit an article
Slovo.ru: Baltic accent

2025 Vol. 16 №2

Back to the list Download the article
Rakhilina E.V. Gyulasaryan S.M. Bychkova P.A.

Pragmatics in the digital age: the Routinicon database

DOI
10.5922/2225-5346-2025-2-2
Pages
28-52
pragmatics constructions routines database Russian language Italian language

Abstract

This study focuses on the Routinicon database as a digital tool for describing routines — a distinct class of formulaic phraseological units that represent reactions to or comments on standard extralinguistic situations. For instance, the formula Kogo ya vizhu! (Whom do I see!) serves as a reaction to an unexpected meeting, while Kto tam? (Who’s there?) is a standard formulaic reaction to a knock at the door. The collection, classification and study of units of this kind is of undoubted interest both from the point of view of discourse theory and pragmatics, and from the point of view of the practice of mastering live spoken Russian by foreign speakers. Routinicon is a natural extension of the projects Russian Constructicon and Pragmaticon and borrows principles of data collection and data processing from the predecessor projects. At the same time, Routinicon collects phraseological units of a different type than these databases, and their description requires a fundamentally different annotation structure. The article discusses the principles and features of this annotation, as well as its potential for the intralingual classification of Russian language routines and its applicability to the corresponding material of other languages — laying the groundwork for future typological studies. Italian language examples collected by the authors are used for illustrations.

Reference

Aijmer, K., 2014. Conversational Routines in English: Convention and Creativity. Lon­don; New York, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315845128.

Ameka, F. A., 1987. Comparative analysis of linguistic routines in two languages: English and Ewe. Journal of Pragmatics, 11, pp. 299—326, https://doi.org/10.1016/ 0378-2166(87)90135-4.

Apresyan, V. Y., 2004. Novyi ob"yasnitel'nyi slovar' sinonimov russkogo yazyka [Articles for the New Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Synonyms]. 2nd ed. Mos­cow (in Russ.).

Austin, J. L., 1975. How to do things with words. 2nd ed. Oxford.

Balakay, A. G., 2001. Slovar' russkogo rechevogo etiketa [Dictionary of Russian Speech Etiquette]. 2nd ed. Moscow (in Russ.).

Baranov, A. N. and Dobrovolskij, D. O., 2008. Aspekty teorii frazeologii [Aspects of Phraseology Theory]. Moscow (in Russ.).

Baranov, A. N. and Dobrovolskij, D. O., 2022. Osnovy frazeologii [Basics of Phra­seo­logy]. Moscow (in Russ.).

Barotto, A. and Mauri, C., 2018. Constructing Lists to Construct Categories. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 30 (1), pp. 95—134, https://doi.org/10.26346/1120-2726- 117.

Benigni, V., Cotta Ramusino, P. M., Mollica, F. and Schafroth, E., 2015. How to apply CxG to phraseology: a multilingual research project. Journal of Social Sciences, 11 (3), pp. 275—288, https://doi.org/10.3844/jsssp.2015.275.288.

Boas, H. C. and Ziem, A., 2018. Constructing a constructicon for German. In: B. Lyngfelt, L. Borin, K. Ohara and T. T. Torrent, eds. Constructicography: Constructicon development across languages, pp. 183—228, https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.22.07boa.

Bulygina, T. V., 1982. Towards the Construction of a Typology of Predicates in the Russian Language. In: O. N. Seliverstova, ed. Semanticheskie tipy predikatov [Se­man­tic Types of Predicates]. Moscow, pp. 7—85 (in Russ.).

Buzanov, A., Bychkova, P., Molchanova, A., Postnikova, A. and Ryzhova, D., 2022. Multilingual Pragmaticon: Database of Discourse Formulae. In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pp. 3331—3336.

Bychkova, P. and Rakhilina, E. V., 2023. Towards pragmatic construction typo­logy: The case of discourse formulae. In: A. Barotto and S. Mattiola, eds. Discourse phe­nomena in typological perspective. Amsterdam, pp. 35—63, https://doi.org/10. 1075/slcs.227.03byc.

Bychkova, P., Yaskevich, A., Gyulasaryan, S. and Rakhilina, E. V., 2024. Building a Database of Conversational Routines. In: Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-CO­LING 2024). Torino, pp. 2548—2555.

Coulmas, F., ed., 1981. Rasmus Rask Studies in Pragmatic Linguistics. Vol. 2. Mou­ton.

Croft, W., 1994. Speech act classification, language typology and cognition. In: S. L. Tsohatzidis, ed. Foundations of speech act theory: Philosophical and linguistic perspec­tives. London, pp. 460—477.

Degand, L. and Evers-Vermeul, J., 2015. Grammaticalization or pragmaticali­za­tion of discourse markers?: More than a terminological issue. Journal of Historical Prag­matics, 16 (1), pp. 59—85, https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.16.1.03deg.

Diewald, G., 2011. Grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. In: The Oxford hand­book of grammaticalization. Oxford, pp. 450—461, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780199586783.013.0036.

Endresen, A. and Janda, L. A., 2020. Taking Construction Grammar one step fur­ther: Families, clusters, and networks of evaluative constructions in Russian. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, pp. 1—22, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.574353.

Endresen, A., Janda, L. A., Zhukova, V., Mordashova, D. and Rakhilina, E., 2025. From a list into a network: Growing the Russian Constructicon via research on fami­lies of constructions. In: A. Ziem, A. Willich and S. Michel, eds. Constructing construc­ticons: Issues, approaches and cross-linguistic perspectives. Amsterdam (in print).

Fillmore, C. J., 1984. Remarks on contrastive pragmatics. In: J. Fisiak, ed. Contras­ti­ve linguistics: Prospects and problems. Amsterdam, pp. 119—141.

Fillmore, C. J., 2008. Border conflicts: FrameNet meets construction grammar. In: Proceedings of the XIII EURALEX international congress. Vol. 4968. Barcelona, pp. 49—68.

Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P. and O’Connor, M. C., 1988. Regularity and idiomaticity in gram­matical constructions: The case of let alone. Language, 64 (3), pp. 501—538, https://doi.org/10.2307/414531.

Fillmore, C. J., Lee-Goldman, R. and Rhodes, R., 2012. The FrameNet construc­ticon. In: H. C. Boas and I. A. Sag, eds. Sign-based construction grammar. Stanford, pp. 309—372.

FrameNet. Available at: https://framenet. icsi. berkeley. edu/luIndex [Accessed 9 August 2024].

Givón, T., 1975. Cause and control: On the semantics of interpersonal manipula­tion. Syntax and Semantics, 4, pp. 59—89.

Hoffmann, T. and Trousdale, G., 2013. The Oxford handbook of construction gram­mar. Oxford; New York.

Janda, L., Endresen, A., Zhukova, V., Mordashova, D. and Rakhilina, E. V., 2023. From data to theory: An emergent semantic classification based on the large-scale Russian constructicon. Constructions and Frames, 15 (1), pp. 1—58, https://doi.org/ 10.1075/cf.00066.jan.

Janda, L., Lyashevskaya, O., Nesset, T., Rakhilina, E. and Tyers, F. M., 2018. A con­structicon for Russian. In: B. Lyngfelt, L. Borin, K. Ohara and T. T. Torrent, eds. Const­ructicography: Constructicon development across languages. Amsterdam, pp. 165—182, https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.22.06jan.

Kay, P. and Fillmore, C. J., 1999. Grammatical constructions and linguistic gene­ra­li­zations: The ‘What’s X doing Y?’ construction. Language, 75, pp. 1—33.

Natsional'nyi korpus russkogo yazyka [National Corpus of the Russian Language]. Available at: https://ruscorpora.ru/ [Accessed 1 October 2024] (in Russ.).

Ohara, K. H., 2013. Toward constructicon building for Japanese in Japanese Fra­meNet. Veredas — Revista de Estudos Linguísticos, 17 (1), pp. 11—28.

Orlov, A., Butenko, Z., Demidova, D., Starchenko, V., Rakhilina, E. and Lyashev­skaya, O. 2023. Russian Constructicon 2.0: New Features and New Perspectives of the Biggest Constructicon Ever Built. In: Proceedings of the International Conference “Dialogue”. Vol. 2023, https://doi.org/10.28995/2075-7182-2023-22-378-385.

Puzhaeva, S. Y., Gerasimenko, E. A., Zakharova, E. S. and Rakhilina, E. V., 2018. Automatic Extraction of Discourse Formulae from Russian Texts. Vestnik NSU. Series: Linguistics and Intercultural Communication, 16 (2), pp. 5—18, https://doi.org/10. 25205/1818-7935-2018-16-2-5-18 (in Russ.).

Rakhilina, E. V. and Kuznetsova, Y. L., 2010. Grammar of Constructions: Theory, Supporters, Related Ideas. In: E. V. Rakhilina, ed. Lingvistika konstruktsii [Linguistics of Constructions]. Moscow, pp. 18—79 (in Russ.).

Rakhilina, E. V. and Uhlik, M., 2020. Construction Grammar and Slavic. In: M. Green­berg and L. Grenoble, eds. Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online. Leiden, https://doi.org/10.1163/2589-6229_ESLO_COM_032441.

Rakhilina, E. V., Bychkova, P. A. and Zhukova, S. Y., 2021. Speech Acts as a Linguistic Category. Discourse Formulae. Voprosy Jazykoznanija [Topics in the study of language], 2, pp. 7—27, https://doi.org/10.31857/0373-658X.2021.2.7-27 (in Russ.).

Rakhilina, E. V., Zhukova, V. A., Demidova, D. A., Kudryavtseva, P. S., Rozov­skaya, G. P., Endresen, A. A. and Janda, L. A., 2022. Phraseology from the Perspective of the “Russian Constructicon”. Trudy Instituta russkogo yazyka im. V. V. Vinogradova [Proceedings of the V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute], 2 (32), pp. 13—44, https://doi.org/10.31912/pvrli-2022.2.2 (in Russ.).

Sadock, J. M. and Zwicky, A. M., 1985. Speech act distinctions in syntax. Language Typology and Syntactic Description, 1, pp. 155—196.

Sbisà, M. and Turner, K., eds., 2013. Pragmatics of speech actions. Berlin, https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110214383.

Searle, J. R., 1976. A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5, pp. 1—23.

Sköldberg, E., Bäckström, L., Borin, L. et al., 2013. Between grammars and dictio­na­ries: A Swedish constructicon. Electronic lexicography in the 21st century: thinking outside the paper: Proceedings of the eLex 2013 conference, 17—19 October 2013, Tallinn, Estonia. Ljubljana; Tallinn, pp. 310—327.

Torrent, T. T., Meireles Lage, L., Sampaio, T. F., da Silva Tavares, T. and da Silva Ma­tos, E. E., 2014. Revisiting border conflicts between FrameNet and construction gram­mar: Annotation policies for the Brazilian Portuguese constructicon. Frames, constructions, and computation, 6, pp. 34—51, https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.6.1.03tor.

Yaskevich, A. A., Bychkova, P. A., Slepak, E. A. and Rakhilina, E. V., 2022. The Database of Discourse Formulae in Russian “Pragmaticon”. Proceedings of the V. V. Vi­nogradov Russian Language Institute, 2 (32), pp. 45—62, https://doi.org/10.31912/ pvrli-2022.2.3 (in Russ.).

Zalizniak, Anna A., 1992. Issledovaniya po semantike predikatov vnutrennego sostoya­niya [Studies on the Semantics of Inner State Predicates]. Munich (in Russ.).