2026 Vol. 18 №2

The article presents a comparative study of xenopointers, understood as pragmatic mark­ers of reported or attributed speech, across contemporary Slavic languages. These units con­stitute an important part of discourse organisation, as they encode speakers’ metacommunica­tive reflection and strategies for representing an external or distanced voice. While individual markers have been extensively described within specific linguistic traditions, their cross-Slavic typological analysis remains insufficiently systematised. The study aims to identify and classify lexical xenopointers in major Slavic languages and to establish their functional and pragmatic correspondences. The research is based on a corpus-driven discourse approach that combines quantitative analysis of parallel and monolingual corpora with qualitative ex­amination of contextual usage. Special attention is given to translated literary texts, which provide a suitable basis for multilingual comparison and for tracing translation strategies involving pragmatic markers. The analysis demonstrates that lexical xenopointers are attested in all examined Slavic languages, including those in which evidentiality is primarily ex­pressed through grammatical means. The study reveals both shared typological patterns and language-specific differences in the etymology, distribution, and pragmatic scope of these markers, as well as considerable variability in their translational equivalents. The findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between evidentiality, quota­tivity, and epistemic modality in discourse and offer new empirical insights for corpus prag­matics and cross-linguistic research.

The article investigates pragmatic meanings of procedural metacommunicative com­ments in contemporary Russian and the methods of their objective explication in linguistic description. The focus is on the constructions ‘inache govorja’ (Eng. in other words), ‘prosh­che govorja’ (Eng. simply put), and ‘drugimi slovami’ (Eng. to put it differently), which func­tion as markers of alternative nomination or reformulation in an utterance. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that in most linguistic research, the interpretation of the pragmatic func­tion of such units is based primarily on the researcher’s intuition, which makes the re­sulting conclusions largely subjective. The article proposes an experimental approach that makes it possible to compare linguistic interpretation with native speakers’ perceptions. The experiment was conducted using data from the Russian National Corpus. Participants were asked to evaluate the acceptability of utterances containing different metacommunicative comments, the possibility of their mutual substitution in specific contexts, and the functions these comments perform within the utterance. The results of the experiment show that the metacommunicative constructions under consideration are not perceived by native speakers as fully equivalent and differ in their degree of contextual acceptability. The findings demon­strate that the metacommunicative comment ‘inache govorja’ is semantically and pragmati­cally closer to the construction ‘drugimi slovami’, whereas ‘proshche govorja’ has a narrower semantic scope and a more clearly defined pragmatic meaning. In addition, variability in the functional interpretation of metacommunicative comments is revealed, which confirms the complex and context-dependent nature of their pragmatic meaning. The results demonstrate the necessity of employing experimental methods in the description of metacommunication and refine our understanding of the functional differentiation of procedural metacommunica­tive devices.

The consolidated Dictionary of the language of Russian Poetry (20th century) is based on a corpus of texts by ten major poets of the Silver Age, from Innokenty Annensky to Marina Tsvetaeva. The dictionary combines the features of a complete concordance with those of a differential explanatory dictionary. Its distinctive characteristic is the exhaustive scope of its lexical coverage: all units function as headwords, including function words. The functioning of discourse words in poetic language has attracted considerable attention in con­temporary scholarship. This article examines the particle ‘khot’ (‘even’), described in the dic­tionary entry (‘KHOT’) in this dictionary. In explanatory and specialised dictionaries, as well as in scholar­ly literature, ‘khot’ is classified as a particle homonymous with the conjunction ‘khot’/khotya’ (‘although’, ‘even if’). In the poetic dictionary, however, ‘khot’ / khotya’, both as a conjunction and as a particle in its different meanings, is not divided into separate homon­ymous entries but is presented within a single dictionary entry, with variant forms taken into account. This group of units is surrounded by a lexical nest formed by the verb ‘khotet’ (‘to want’), and the etymological connection between ‘khot’ / khotya’ and this nest is further em­phasised by the presence of the homonymous gerund form ‘khot’. A systematic analysis of dictionary exam­ples containing the particle ‘khot’ reveals the specific features of its poetic functioning. This specificity is manifested in the increased frequency of particular collocations and construc­tions involving this word, its recurrence in poetic contexts, its use both in the author’s voice and in the speech of literary characters, and its contribution to the formation of a moderately lowered stylistic colouring of poetry.

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the inferential discourse marker Rus. ‘sledovatel’no’ (Eng. therefore) in poetic and judicial discourses. The relevance of the study lies in the insufficient attention paid to the pragmatic dimension of discourse markers in insti­tutional and literary communication. The research aims to identify discourse-specific patterns of functional change in inferential markers operating under opposing communicative orienta­tions: linguistic creativity in poetry and normative regulation in judicial discourse. The data comprise corpora of poetic and judicial texts. The methodology combines corpus-based dis­course analysis with pragmatic and speech act theory. In poetic discourse, inferential markers may lose their function of logical inference and be reinterpreted as means of metalinguistic reflection and disruption of logical-syntactic relations. In judicial discourse, by contrast, in­ferential markers are integrated into procedural formulas and perform a declarative illocu­tionary function, institutionally fixing decisions and presenting them as logically inevitable. The study reveals a discourse-driven asymmetry in the pragmatic effects of inferential dis­course markers, demonstrating their linguo-creative potential in poetry and their manipula­tive as well as regulatory functions in judicial communication.

The article examines the pragmatic and semantic mechanisms underlying the discursive realisation of implicit evaluativeness in Russian idioms. The aim of the study is to identify the implicit positive or negative evaluative meanings of phraseological units whose evaluative connotations are not recorded in dictionaries but emerge through their immediate and broader contextual environment. The analysis focuses on the idiom ‘iz ryada von’ (vykhodyashchiy) (Eng.‘out of the ordinary’) and its reduced variant ‘iz ryada von’. The research procedure is based on the author’s methodology of content-based and quantitative corpus-discourse analy­sis. The material includes lexicographic definitions of these expressions in the major Russian explanatory and phraseological dictionaries, as well as usage contexts extracted by continuous sampling from the main corpus of the Russian National Corpus. The quantitative analysis is based on the first 100 occurrences of the target expressions in the corpus. The core semantics of the idiom involves the idea of exceptional qualities, properties, or characteristics of a person or object. A preliminary analysis of dictionary definitions showed that neither the definitional zone, nor stylistic labels and the implications of the definitional components contain any indi­cation of evaluative meaning. The only information provided is general expressiveness and stylistic restriction, namely, their association with colloquial speech. However, corpus analy­sis revealed a clear predominance of contexts with negative evaluative colouring. In other words, in actual usage by native speakers of Russian, the expression ‘iz ryada von’ (vykhodyashchiy) is rarely used to describe someone or something genuinely valuable or ex­clusively positive, particularly in moral or spiritual terms. The study concludes that the se­mantic drift of this phraseological unit towards implicit negative evaluativeness may be de­termined by national and cultural factors.

During conversation, extended monologic passages may occasionally occur. The aim of this study is to identify the features of speech and gesticulation that speakers use to signal either their intention to continue a monologue or, conversely, the approaching completion of the monologue and their readiness to yield the floor to an interlocutor. The study is based on the corpus Russian Pear Chats and Stories (RUPEX), which is equipped with detailed multi­channel annotation. Each session included in the corpus contains a monologic stage, during which a story is narrated, followed by an interactive conversation. This design makes the cor­pus particularly suitable for the present research purpose. Relying on the episodic structure of the narratives, as well as on the notions of the elementary discourse unit (EDU), the spoken sentence, and the functional types of manual gestures, the study arrives at the following re­sults. Among the verbal signals of monologue completion, it was found that speakers tend to reduce the length of spoken sentences, that is, sequences of EDUs forming a single prosodic complex. In all the sessions examined, speakers concluded their stories with sentences consist­ing of only one or two EDUs. Moreover, in the interval immediately preceding the final seg­ment, most speakers increased sentence length.

As for gestural signals of monologue completion, the analysis shows that the final epi­sode, in contrast to the preceding ones, is characterised by a lower proportion of depictive gestures illustrating the events being described, as well as by a higher proportion of pragmatic gestures and beats expressing the speaker’s stance or organising discourse structure. These changes in speech and gesticulation may be interpreted by interlocutors as indications of the forthcoming completion of the monologue and the prospect of turn-taking.