TOWARDS MULTIMODAL MODELLING OF VERIFICATIONAL DISCOURSE MARKERS IN RUSSIAN DIALOG

In the paper we present the results of а multimodal analysis of some Russian discourse markers (DMs) expressing positive verification — da ‘yes’, da-da ‘yes’, nu da ‘yes’,конечно ‘of course’, разумеется ‘of course’, естественно ‘naturally’. In a dialogical turn of a given speaker they mark the proposition P of the previous turn of the interlocutor as true. DMs of this type have variable prosody and may redundantly be accompanied with a synonymous gesture “nod”. The aim of the study was to identify the factors that influence the paraverbal aspects of such DMs. The analysis of mini-dialogs from the multimodal subcorpus of RNC revealed the correlations between various syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors on the one hand and gestural accompaniment and prosodical features of DMs on the other. Moreover, the survey showed some instances of backchanneling which is similar to verification under certain conditions. The results obtained may be useful for modelling the paraverbal behavior of embodied computer agents and robots.