THE RUSSIAN DISCOURSE WORD ВОТ REVISITED

This paper deals with the Russian discourse word вот. The analysis is based on the data of the Russian National Corpus (however, the paper claims that a critical attitude to corpus data helps to ensure their reliability). It makes an attempt to identify the characteristics of вот that are insufficiently taken into account in existing lexicographic descriptions. The paper discusses the word in question as it occurs in texts of different styles and genres. It shows that the word is extremely frequent in oral speech, very frequent in electronic communication and in fiction. As for its frequency in other domains of non-fiction, its frequency depends on the degree of informality. It is relatively frequent in everyday communication and in journalism and less frequent in advertizing and in academic discourse where it is used as a marker of informality. The word does not occur in the official communication. The paper pays special attention to some of the constructions characteristic of вот and the word order in some special cases. In addition, it involves data from parallel subcorpora in the consideration.