Towards a Description of Pragmatic Markers in Russian Everyday Speech Natalia Bogdanova-Beglarian , Tatiana Sherstinova ( ✉ ) , Olga Blinova , Gregory Martynenko , and Ekaterina Baeva Saint Petersburg State University, 7/9 Universitetskaya nab., St. Petersburg 199034, Russia {n.bogdanova,t.sherstinova,o.blinova, g.martynenko,e.baeva}@spbu.ru Abstract. By “pragmatic markers” we mean discourse units (words and multi‐ word expressions) with a weakened referential meaning, which perform a variety of pragmatic or procedural speaker’s tasks. The paper aims at the development of approaches to systematize and describe the inventory of pragmatic markers in a wide scale way, based on comprehensive corpus data. The theoretical and methodological basis for the corpus study of pragmatic markers in Russian is introduced. The provisional version of pragmatic markers classification is proposed. The description of pragmatic markers will be carried out on the material of representative corpora of Russian dialogic and monologic speech. Keywords: Modern Russian · Everyday speech · Pragmatic markers Spoken dialogue · Spoken monologue · Speech corpus 1 Introduction In contrast to written discourse, spoken speech has its own rules and therefore requires special research methods and approaches. The functional units forming spoken discourse are traditionally divided into the following groups: 1. Basic units, which represent major speech content (e. g., lexical units fully possessing lexical and grammatical meaning). 2. “Auxiliary” units, which help speakers to build up and structure spoken discourse (e. g., various kinds of pragmatic markers, parentheses and functional words). As a rule, these units regularly occur in everyday speech by all Russian speakers, they can be used repeatedly, and therefore, they tend to be of high frequency. 3. Sound “artifacts” (vocalizations, breaks, and all kinds of speech-accompanying events, such as laugh, cough etc.). The paper focuses on pragmatic markers belonging to the class of “auxiliary” speech items. These markers mostly have merely pragmatic functions and are characterized by almost complete absence (or significant weakening) of lexical and/or grammatical meaning. It should be noted that pragmatic markers are characterized by extremely high frequency, exceeding that of almost all content words in spoken discourse. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 A. Karpov et al. (Eds.): SPECOM 2018, LNAI 11096, pp. 42–48, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99579-3_5