Linguistic features of human-to-pet communication

In everyday life a person often communicates with a number of addressees, including those that are not quite usual. Talking to such an unusual addressee, the speaker does not receive a verbal reply. However, this does not keep people from talking to non-responsive communicants. There is a number of research papers devoted to this issue. The main findings so far are reviewed in the article being illustrated with examples from one of the modules of the «One Speaker's Day» corpus of the spoken Russian language (ORD). The principal aim of the researchers created this module was to investigate speech behaviour of native Russian speakers using the method of 24-hour continuous stream recording. Thus, there is a possibility to recreate and study communication of various social (gender, age, and professionally-oriented) groups during a single day. On the day of recording volunteers of the project may be talking to their colleagues and friends, their students and teachers, family members and fellow commuters; they talk in the street, at work, in stores, at pharmacies, while travelling etc. The list of their unusual communicants includes cats and dogs, plants, furniture, computers, cars. The article focuses on conversations with pets. The speakers labeled in the ORD corpus as I22, I24, I28, I35, I72 are two males and four females. Their communicants are five cats and a dog. The article also highlights the common patterns of a particular speaker's speech behaviour while conversing with pets and children and describes trends in their talking to adults. It also examines possible motives stimulating speech contacts with unusual communicants.