The category of intensity and its manifestation in Russian spoken expository dialogue

The present article focuses on the structure and functioning of the category of intensity in Russian expository dialogues as well as a new three-dimensional approach to its study as a modus category in cognitive linguistics. The research data comprise about three hours of video recordings of 20 participants as the speakers dwell upon a series of questions on the topic of AI in a specifically designed experiment setting. The collected speech was automatically recognised, transcribed, assigned to speakers, and segmented by the automated speech-to-text (transcription) tool Whisper integrated into ELAN. The upcoming analysis was conducted on the verbal markers of intensity singled out within it. Mainly expository (explanatory) by its nature, including multiple cases of authentic turn taking, explicit evaluation and personal opinion manifestation, the data set proved to be rich in the samples of interest and provided 1072 cases of intensity. We regarded intensity as a cognitive category that could be described within three dimensions, epistemological, ontological and semiotic. The dimensions served as three vectors for more detailed qualitative and quantitative (including Wilcoxon and Student's tests) analyses of intensity cases. Each dimension possessed a unique set of classification features. Among the epistemological features, we opted for the basic degree of intensity (high, medium, and low) and conceptual representation of intensity describing the cohesion between the meaning of quantity and quality, where even if the former stayed the main meaning of the verbal marker, it was tightly linked with the latter. The spontaneous dialogues under analysis demonstrated the prevalence of high-intensity cases (64%), while quantity and quality proved to be merged in 40% of cases, most of which adhered to low or middle degree of intensity. Meanwhile, the ontological dimension of intensity explored the type of the object modified by intensity as well as the degree of intensity. The predominant objects were non-procedural (commonly manifesting unstable qualities) and substantive ones, 40% and 32% respectively, both mainly used with intensifiers of high degree, whereas procedural objects (commonly manifesting actions) were less frequent in the data and were often employed with intensifiers of high and low degree. Thus, the research resulted in the juxtaposition of substantive and non-procedural features of situation components, on the one hand, and procedural features, on the other hand, in terms of their intensity potential. As for the semiotic dimension, we differentiated between the cases, where intensity was verbalised as a single significative meaning, and where it appeared in context only. Whereas the former would be a more typical case, the relative abundance of the latter (38%) illustrated the speakers' expressivity and creativity in spontaneous expository dialogues. Overall, the results helped identify the epistemological, ontological and semiotic potential of the category of intensity expressed in the specificity of its qualitative and quantitative relations as well as its relevance to different situation components. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Keywords

Authors

References