DISCOURSE FORMULAE, POLYSEMY AND GESTURE MARKING

The paper suggests a discussion of semantic marking for specific multiword colloquial constructions, discourse formulae. This type of linguistic unit is used in dialogical speech as isolated remark in response to the utterance of another member of conversation. The properties of discourse formulae include entire fixedness and non-transparent form on one hand and, on the other hand, the ability to develop various illocutionary meanings. In the paper it is argued that in case of polysemy not only the prosody allows to distinguish the intention of the speaker but also the gesture. The role of gesture for disambiguation of formulae meanings is illustrated by the case of Russian highly polysemantic discourse formula Da nu!. The paper covers the classification of contexts of its use which reveals five major meanings of Da nu!: expression of surprise, expression of disbelief, devaluation of the interlocutor, devaluation of the interlocutor’s apology or compliment and “positive” devaluation of the interlocutor’s concern. The process of historical development of the meanings is also briefly highlighted. A quantitative analysis of gesture most commonly accompanying Da nu! in each of the five meanings is further conducted, with the data retrieved from Multimodal Russian Corpus and then manually annotated. The analysis shows correlation between the identified meanings and particular gesture sets. The distribution of the gesture might allow to discover adjacency of the meanings of the formula and also provide a deeper insight into the semantics of the gesture involved.