A TIMIOLOGICAL MEANING COMPONENT OF RUSSIAN DISCURSIVE WORDS

The present paper discusses semantic and pragmatic aspects of such Russian constructions as to-to i ono (along with the variants vot to-to i ono, to-to i ono, chto…), to-to zhe, v tom-to i delo. These constructions belong to a large group of expressions that are used as dialogical reactions. However, they display a specific discourse function that has not been described so far. The corpus data analyzed in this respect show that the central function of such constructions is to emphasize the most im- portant element in the interlocutor’s utterance. Hence, phrasemes of this type can be described as timiological items, i. e. lexical units that point to the importance value. The main theoretical idea of the present paper is that language has special means for indicating the degree of importance of a given utterance part. In contrast to seemingly similar expressions such as da, aga, a to, eshche by, a kak zhe, vot imenno, the speaker uses to-to i ono as well as near-synonymous constructions to refer to an element from the preceding discourse, namely the element that the speaker considers to be decisive for the adequate understanding of a given situation, rather than to express agreement with the interlocutor’s statement.