Formation of Communicatives from Rhetorical Questions

Abstract

The article is devoted to communicatives, grammatically vague response tokens, pointing to the prior utterance in dialog: «Malo li», «A to», «A to net», «A to kak zhe». Often, these tokens are used in some competitive types of Russian discourse. Communicatives serve as signals of the speaker’s communicative intentions in talk-in-interaction. The tokens under analysis derive from special syntactic constructions — rhetorical questions and echo-cues. The transition of syntactic constructions into the domain of communicatives takes place when they realize special discursive strategies of objection, disagreement and confirmation, agreement. We analyze the transition stages using methods of grammaticalization. The syntactic constructions tend to lose its elements, become idiomatic and acquire expressive connotations been used stereotypically in talk-in-interaction. The special point of interest is to discover the ways a speaker humiliates the addressee in controversial dialogues. The article contributes to the theory of grammaticalization, communicative interaction and politeness research. The results of the analysis may be useful for foreign students of Russian.