The subject of this study is discourse markers functioning in the spoken Russian language of Buryatia. The material consists of a corpus of texts from the anthology "Russian Spoken Language of Buryatia" (110 texts, 1767 contexts of use, 81 discourse unit). Discourse markers, as linguistic units that manage the process of interaction among communicants, express evaluations, interpret facts, and regulate contact with interlocutors, have primarily been investigated based on literary usage, whereas their functioning in local subsystems has been insufficiently studied. The spoken Russian language of Buryatia, which has long been focused mainly on the study of dialectal vocabulary and grammar, has not yet been considered from this aspect, while the regional usage demonstrates a stable set of discourse means that are atypical for standardized speech and not recorded in dictionaries. The work employed a functional-semantic method, contextual analysis (as the main tool for interpreting discourse units), a quantitative method (for processing frequency characteristics), as well as a classification method. The scientific novelty lies in the first systematic description of discourse vocabulary based on the spoken Russian language of Buryatia, including quantitative stratification and functional-semantic classification. As a result of the study, a core of high-frequency discourse markers was identified (ну, конечно, наверно(е), да, нет/не/неа, как бы, ага/аха, просто), correlating with all-Russian trends. The dominance of emotionally evaluative, affirmative, and negative units was established, conditioned by the dialogical nature of the material. The polyfunctionality of frequent discourse markers and their ability for contextual desemiantization were confirmed. Locally marked units atypical for the all-Russian usage and absent in normative dictionaries were recorded and described: affirmative ага/аха and "но" as full-fledged equivalents of literary да, as well as regional markers всяко разно, само главно, and мало-мало. The conclusions of the study verify the universal properties of discourse markers based on new empirical material and open prospects for comparative studies of regional variability of discourse vocabulary in different territorial varieties of the Russian language.
Matantseva et al. (Sun,) studied this question.