Russian ‘vot’ as an interactional practice in bilingual Kazakh conversations

Abstract

Aims and objectives:

This study investigates the use of the Russian discourse particle vot in bilingual Kazakh conversations, focusing on its interactional affordances in the organization and management of talk.

Methodology:

The study adopts a conversation-analytic (CA) approach, which seeks to explicate the orderly practices that speakers demonstrably employ in the organization of their mutual interactions through moment-by-moment construction of talk.

Data:

The data come from the Multimedia Corpus of Spoken Kazakh Language, which represents a diverse collection of naturally occurring social interactions in Kazakh-speaking communities, recorded in audio and video formats.

Findings:

The study demonstrates that vot-prefacing emerges as a sequential practice used by Kazakh speakers to reinitiate previously disrupted courses of action and to advance ongoing actions by leveraging prior talk by other speakers. In this way, vot works towards re-establishing or heightening the progressivity of talk.

Originality:

Most studies on contact-induced borrowing overlook the precise mechanisms by which specific discourse/communicative situations or broader socio-cultural factors facilitate borrowing and its subsequent adaptation/use. This paper aims to characterize such social-communicative mechanisms by which speakers deploy and adapt borrowed discourse markers in ways that are interactionally meaningful and relevant to their real-time talk. As such, the emergence of loan discourse markers can be understood as an outcome of both contact-induced change and recurrent interactional demands faced by speakers, not as a byproduct of language contact alone.

Significance/implications:

This article suggests that the emergence and diffusion of discourse markers in contact settings cannot be fully understood without considering the interactional contingencies speakers recurrently face when deploying these items in real-time use. By showing that such contingencies can be empirically observed through synchronic, interactional data, the study argues that synchronic analyses of naturally occurring interaction are essential for understanding the processes through which linguistic items emerge, conventionalize, diffuse, and adapt across languages.