V svoyom rode as a potential pragmatic marker-approximator of Russian everyday speech

The paper analyzes the functioning of the unit v svoyom rode in Russian oral everyday discourse as a potential pragmatic marker-approximator. The source of material for analysis was the spoken subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. The study employs the corpus approach and scientific methods such as continuous sampling, descriptive, comparative, and quantitative methods. The analysis showed that the expression v svoyom rode in oral discourse has significantly enriched its dictionary meaning of uncertainty (‘from a certain point of view’) with a number of pragmatic meanings: approximation (reducing the categoricalness of the statement), hesitation (overcoming speech hesitation and formalizing speech search), reflection on what has been said or is about to be said, and marking the ending of a phrase/remark. The dictionary lexico-grammatical meaning of the unit v svoyom rode in oral use has almost been lost; instead, there appeared several pragmatic meanings (functions) that are not described in the existing dictionaries, which allows us to consider the unit under study as a potential multifunctional pragmatic marker-approximator. This, in turn, may become the basis for including this unit in the Dictionary of Pragmatic Markers. The results obtained can be useful for understanding the trends in the development of Russian everyday speech within the framework of colloquial speech studies (analysis of oral speech), for the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language (linguodidactics), as well as for the practice of translating Russian literary texts into other languages.