PHONETIC T’ANI-TOLKAJ: TWO DIVERGENT TRENDS IN THE ORAL TEXT COTSTRUCTION


2018. № 3 (17), 22-32

 Saint-Petersburg State University

Abstract:

 The article is dedicated to the descriptions of two trends in the oral text construction. At the lexical and syntactic levels, the law of economy is particularly active and fruitful in Russian, leading to some compression or reduction of speech units, and so creating the other ones, new, being at different stages of their path to recognition as a system of language (destruction — in a way — leads to creation). The most striking example of such creation as a result of compression are the lexicalized reduced forms of many, especially super-frequent, Russian words: tыshcha, shchas, pijs’at, zdras’te, s’odn’a, chek (chelovek), grit and so on. The law of economy also leads to the use in speech of approximants of various types that replace a number of enumerations, both transferred by the speaker or his own ones: i vs’o takoe (prochee), p’atoe-des’atoe, to-s’o, bla-bla-bla. On the other hand, on the textual, discursive level of our oral speech, phenomena of diametrically opposite persuasion are revealed, namely, absolutely uneconomical expansion, increment of form without any increment of meaning. This increment is realized due to a large number of unmotivated (hesitation) pauses, non-verbal hesitatives (e-e, a-a, m-m), and also by using various pragmatic units that help the speaker to generate and structure his speech: these are verbal hesitatives (eto samoe, kak jego, ja ne znaju, nu v obshchem), paralinguistic phenomena (laughter, sigh, cough, smacking, tongue clipping, etc.) and so on. These two different trends — reduction and increment — provide oral speech with the specificity (a kind of verbal T’ani-Tolkaj) which requires constant research attention.