Explication of pragmatic meanings of metacommunicative comments as a research problem
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2026-2-6
- Pages
- 118-132
Abstract
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.