Discourse Markers in Academic Spoken Discourse

Abstract

The article describes the classification of Russian pragmatical and discourse markers, based on the corpus of scientific speech, which numbers 34076 word usages. A corpus of spoken academic speech, compiled for the research, contains transcripts of eight speakers having an academic degree in Biology or Medicine who delivered their speeches during conferences in 2015-2016. The purpose of this article is to describe the selection parameters and semantic features of pragmatic and discursive markers that function in oral scientific discourse. The classification of discursive markers in this study is based on the theoretical principles of the Moscow linguistic school and, in particular, the theory of V. V. Vinogradov. When describing pragmatic markers, preference is given to the classification of N. V. Bogdanova-Beglaryan as being the most complete and relevant to the research material-modern Russian texts generated in high professional discourse. A contrastive discourse analysis, combined with a semantic analysis, showed that discourse markers, traditionally used for textual coherence, can acquire functions of pragmatic markers and provide social and interpersonal cohesion.