The repertory of xenomarkers in Russian

The problem of reported speech, quoting, retelling has attracted the attention of linguists for several decades. Citation is approached from different points of view: in the context of the category of evidentiality, in the aspect of the nomenclature of modalities, etc. The paper is devoted to linguistic units that are used in Modern Russian as markers of reported speech, that is, units that mark a piece of text as not belonging or not completely belonging to the main speaker. In Russian, the most famous xenomarkers are particles mol, deskat’, de and jakoby (‘allegedly’). A lot of works have been devoted to them, including the most recent ones. However, as shown in the paper, the arsenal of tools that serve in Modern Russian for coding of retelling is much richer. The corresponding meaning is observed for the words ax, vot (with a special prosodic marking), tipa (which is increasingly used in this function in recent years), as well as the expressions tak i tak ‘so and so’ and vidite li ‘you see’. One more xenomarker is the construction of the type rasskaži da rasskaži, as well as a special range of uses of the conjunction da. Since the speaker, with the help of xeno-indicators, distances himself from the position of another person, such words pragmatically attract different kinds of evaluations of the reported fragment, most often negative ones. Reported speech can be represented not only by proper retelling, but also by speech imitation; there are speech substitutes — meaningless combinations, usually containing repetitions and rhymes, on which a special intonational contour is often realized. These are items like lja-lja-topolja, lja-lja-fa-fa, te-te-te, te-te-ne-ne, teto-eto, as well as a fairly new borrowing bla-bla(‑bla). Marking of reported speech is also performed with the help of intonation and prosodic characteristics, which are also considered in the paper. The study was carried out mainly on the basis of the Russian National Corpus (ruscorpora.ru). The principles and methods of the Moscow Semantic School were used. The results of the research can be applied in theoretical semantics and lexicography, as well as analysis of sounding speech.