COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATIVES

The study focuses on currently underexplored communicative units that are difficult to analyze and describe using traditional linguistic methods. We refer to grammatically vague response tokens pointing to the preceding utterance in a dialog: Подумаешь, Проехали, Сойдёт, Ну ещё бы, Ладно уж and so on. Typical usage of independent and functional words and word combinations as response tokens serves as a signal of the speaker’s communicative intentions in talk-in-interaction. These units are further referred to as communicatives. They have some specific pragmatic characteristics to be analyzed and made explicit. It is obvious that these units can be treated as a separate linguistic class or a functional group. A more adequate description of these linguistic units will require sociolinguistic and discursive methods. Their main pragmatic features are motivated by the dominance of the communicative function of the language over the nominative one. As a result, words and word combinations as response tokens reveal crucial deviations in their meaning, lose it and get new discursive characteristics instead. A communicative is the second part of dialogue adjacency pairs, such as “offer — acceptance or refusal to offer”, “compliment — response to compliment” and so on. The discursive position predetermines the speech act function of communicatives. Another relevant pragmatic feature related to communicatives is their expressive connotation. Communicatives are often accompanied by expressive gestures and mimics. Some traditional dictionaries view communicatives as special cases of word usage and mark them with a rhombus at the end of the dictionary entry followed by a short commentary. Such information is by no means insufficient for adequate use of communicatives, but the problem is that to date there is no reliable lexicographic scheme for describing such units. Russian communicatives are a challenge to foreign students as inappropriate use of these units is a diagnostic sign of “foreignness” along with an accent and incorrect use of idioms and verb aspect. The lexicographic method seems to be the best way to provide an explicit explanation of pragmatic features of communicatives. Taking into account that communicatives’ function in dialogues can be determined by applying discursive methods when analyzing the dialogue structure, it should be a very specialized dictionary.