Verbal Means of Communicative Contact in Modern Russian

Abstract

The central task of this article was to describe the nomenclature of multi-level verbal means that serve to establish, transform and maintain verbal interaction. From the standpoint of the integrativecomparative approach being developed, the paper outlines the integral and differential features of these verbal means as components of the system of pragmatically valent contactives of the modern Russian language. As the main research method, a comprehensive corpus-contextual analysis was used, providing objectivity and a possibility of verifying the desired results. Dominant and peripheral zones were identified, specific hierarchical relationships of their actualization in texts were established, and the structure and part-of-speech affiliation of contactives were analysed. This determines the novelty and practical significance of the paper, which expands the base of theoretical and methodological information about the system of such verbal means as contactives by filling in the gaps in modern linguistic knowledge in the range of detecting universal and specific ways of manifestation of national-cultural and individual attitudes in the process of verbal interaction, as well as in understanding these verbal means as elements that identify specific features of the participants in communication. As the material for the study, we used texts from the National Corpus of the Russian Language, representing situations of establishing, transforming and maintaining verbal communication. The research proved (based on the material of a single national corpus, i.e. National Corpus of the Russian Language) the productivity of the integrative-comparative strategy in general and corpus-contextual analysis in particular in solving the problem of systematic description of verbal means that explicate the communicative situation in the totality of all its components.