Construction of an oral Monologic description in the native and non-native language: the beginning of the text (based on the descriptions of the comic strip by Herluf Bidstrup ‘Elixir for hair’)

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the beginnings of spontaneous monologic descriptions and their peculiarities. The descriptions were recorded from 8 Russian and 20 Chinese informants when speaking in Russian, i.e. when speaking in the native and non-native language, respectively. All texts are descriptions of Herluf Bidstrup’s comic strip Elixir for Hair, which represents a series of 13 interconnected pictures telling a story of a bald man. This material is part of the corpus of Russian monologic speech created at Saint Petersburg State University and known as the Balanced Annotated Text Library (SAT). The main research method is comparative. The description of the material was performed at the levels of discourse and structure, it is provided with quantitative data and correlations with the characteristics of the informants: social characteristics - gender and the level of Russian language proficiency (for the Chinese) - and psychological characteristics (extroverts / ambiverts / introverts). The analysis of the material showed that the construction of a monologic description is determined by a number of lexical, cultural, and individual factors. The spontaneity of such a monologue is determined by the fact that the ideal three-part structure (beginning - main part - ending) is not always realized. Among the beginnings in the analyzed material, two types were identified: verbal (nominative themes, ‘fabulous-narrative’ beginning, starting pragmatic marker) and non-verbal (hesitation, paralinguistics), as well as their combinations. The most common way to indicate the beginning of a monologue for the Russian and Chinese informants was hesitationvocalization. The Chinese prefer the verbal beginning, especially constructions with nominative themes and ‘fabulous-narrative’ beginnings, while the Russians prefer starting pragmatic markers. The results of the analysis can be useful both for colloquialistics (the theory of colloquial speech) and for the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language (linguodidactics).