Esli ugodno 'If you will': A philological sketch for the portrait of a metaoperator (Based on the Russian National Corpus)

This article aims to study the functioning patterns of one of the metacommunicative markers – the metaoperator esli ugodno 'if you will' used as an introductory expression in a wide range of metalanguage contexts. This metaoperator fixes the zones of metalanguage tension and acts as a signal of metalanguage reflection. The total of 1864 contexts were selected from the Russian National Corpus and further processed using functionalsemantic, functionalpragmatic and contextual analysis. The results show the tendency towards the grammaticalization of the expression. Its transformation from a predicative unit with a modal meaning into an introductory unit is one of the active processes in modern Russian. The metaoperator is characterized by syntactic freedom with respect to the object of reflection. The study enabled to identify 2 main functional and semantic roles of the metaoperator: 1) to mark the communicative tension when choosing a language unit, 2) to comprehend the results of the choice of the sign. In its first function, the metaoperator signals difficulties in choosing a sign being a marker of hesitations, in the second function it appears a marker of the status of the selected sign determined by the direction of communication (signals of fuzzy nomination and explanation), stylistic coloring (a signal of the sign belonging to a particular style), emotional and expressive features (signals of euphemization or dysphemization) as well as linguocreative potential (the signal of the language game).