Metacommunicative pragmatic markers: gender aspect

The article deals with the use of metacommunicative pragmatic markers in the gender aspect, taking into account the social roles of the speaker. The research is carried out based on the data of the ORD corpus of Russian Everyday Speech, known as ‘One Speaker’s Day’, which contains transcripts of audio recordings obtained under natural conditions. The subsample includes about 200 thousand words. It features episodes of ‘speaker’s days’ of 15 women and 15 men belonging to three age groups. The informants act in various social roles, opposed by the principle of symmetry/asymmetry. Pragmatic annotation of the material and further discursive analysis have demonstrated that metacommunication is actively used in the speech of the informants, but it is much more common for the women’s speech. The men use markers of this type with specific speech tasks, for example, for a refusal (слушай / у меня нет денег ); in the women’s speech, the variability of metacommunicative markers is wider but there is no functional diversity. This confirms the observations of linguists, obtained from the material of various languages, that women tend to cooperate and maintain dialogue to a greater extent than men. From the perspective of feminist linguistics, this feature of female speech is directly related to the issues of the women’s dependent position since it reflects their passivity and the habit of yielding. However, more than half of the detected uses belong to the speech of women of the older age group (from 55 years old) who communicate with relatives and friends, while in the younger age group the metacommunicative pragmatic markers become multifunctional and also act in speech as a start marker.