THE FORMING OF NEW FUNCTIONS OF A DISCOURSE MARKER ZNACHIT IN THE SPOKEN DISCOURSE

Background. In modern linguistics the phenomena of oral speech are actively studied, in particular the functioning of the discourse markers (units that play a crucial role in organizing the narrative and structuring the generated by the speaker discourse) in it. The purpose of this work is to describe the forming of new functions of discourse marker znachit to identify contextual and prosodic features that allow to classify the uses of the word znachit in natural oral speech. Materials and methods. The material of an analysis was taken from the oral and multimedia corpora of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The total amount of material selected for the study consists of approximately 8500 words, 200 uses of the discourse marker znachit were analyzed. The method of the discourse analysis, the comparative method and quantitative method were used during the research. Results. The results of the study show the development of the functions of the discourse marker znachit in the natural oral speech: znachit fulfills the «starting function», the speech error marking function, and the quotation marking function. Via the Praat program the prosodic features of the discourse marker znachit were analyzed in the above-mentioned functions. In the course of the analysis of the prosodic features znachit in the different groups we managed to reveal that in the 3rd group contexts (in the situation of quoting) znachit is pronounced shorter than in the examples from the 1st, 2nd and 4th groups. The uses of znachit in the examples of the 2nd (the situation of the speech error) and 4th (the beginning of a new part of discourse) groups have an approximately equal duration range, but differ in the tone movement and pause locations in relation to the discourse marker. In the 2nd group of examples znachit is pronounced longer than in the other groups. Practical implications. The results of the study can be used to specify the definition of this unit.