Statements about language as a variety of metalanguage discourse of the Russian Germans

The article is devoted to the language of the Russian Germans - a subethnos covered by the processes of linguocultural shift. The corpus of analyzed texts was collected in Tomsk region through field work with native speakers of German dialects, most of whom are elderly or senior people. The work was carried out in line with perceptual dialectology, a linguistic direction that combines the achievements of traditional dialectology and “naive” linguistics. It also implements the approaches of discursive and pragmatic linguistics. The focus of the study is the system of metalanguage representations of the Russian Germans' reflected in texts of an improvised nature - in metalanguage statements. The analysis carried out allows not only to find out the features of Russian Germans' understanding of language reality, but also to typol-ogize the metalanguage discourse of the linguistic culture under consideration. The typology is built based on the pragmatic and information-semantic structures of the text. In the first case, the typical communicative orientation of metalanguage statements is determined, in the second, the stereotypical semantic logic of these texts, which is realized as a regular thematic objectification of certain phenomena and properties of language reality. As a result of the study, it has been established that the most typical communicative intention of the speaker in the course of the explication of metalanguage reflection is to inform the interlocutor about certain facts of the language nature. Implementing a communicative strategy of an informing type, the speaker focuses on acquiring identical knowledge about the world by his interlocutor, mastering general ideas about the current state of affairs. Description is the main tactic that determines the palette and combinatorics of speech actions of an informing metalanguage statement. The metalanguage statements that implement the communicative strategy of informing and the tactics of description reflect the ideas of German dialect speakers about language formations that constitute their own competence or are among those who are contacted. The reflection expressed by the considered type of dialect speech also extends to individual phenomena of language systems - the word and the text. The description of languages and language variants, words, texts is realized through a statement of the territorial and social boundaries of the functioning of these objects of reflection, typical situational conditions of usage, time frames of existence, correlation with written or oral form of communication. Thus, the explication of the metalanguage consciousness of the type under discussion reflects the variability of language and the existence of limits to the spread of language variants. The work contributes to the study of German colloquial speech, is of an ecolinguistic nature, and expands the understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie ordinary metalanguage reflection.

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