Pragmatics and prosody: the analysis of oral speech as a principle of linguistic pragmatics

The paper views pragmatic meanings that have regular expression in language. Such meanings are 1) the illocutionary goal (illocutionary force) of an utterance, 2) the illocu­tio­nary function of a component of an utterance (theme and rheme of a statement, the known and the unknown of a question), 3) contrast and emphasis, and 4) the meaning of complete­ness/incompleteness of a speech act as a component of coherent discourse. It is shown that prosody is the main means of expressing pragmatic meanings in the languages of the world, and the expressed meanings are organized into a system that corresponds to the system of the prosodic means used. The study uses corpus and instrumental methods of analysis. The main material for analysis is the Russian language. The multimodal subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language was used as a corpus for the study. The primacy of prosody over segmental means of expressing the most important pragmatic meanings is demonstrated, in particular, using the material of the previously insufficiently studied speech act of an echo-question. An echo-question is statistically often a short speech act with minimal segmental material (“What?” “Eh?”). Consequently, the completeness and accuracy of the analysis for various types of echo-questions can only be achieved through the use of the corpus method, which allows obtaining a sufficient amount of data and representative material for analysis.