Typified colloquial syntactic constructions in modern Russian spoken scientific language: Structural-functional analysis

The relevance of the study stems from the need to bridge the gap between receptive proficiency in scientific language and actual professional communication in an academic setting. Modern teaching methods often focus on written language forms, whereas natural spoken science communication (discussions, reports, project defences) requires specific linguistic skills. The study aims to identify, systematise, and describe the typical colloquial syntactic constructions functioning in modern Russian spoken scientific language, as well as to determine their structural types and communicative functions. The research material included recordings of presentations on scientific topics given between 1990 and 2020 in public settings (scientific conferences, seminars, dissertation defences, round-table discussions) held at Pushkin State Russian Language Institute. The research employed the so-called cluster sample from nine areas of study. These included social sciences and humanities (history, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics) as well as natural sciences and engineering (chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and thermodynamics). Comparative/contrastive, transformation, descriptive, and statistical methods were used. The segment which is a group of words of varying length delimited on the right and on the left by intonation was found to be the basic building block of spoken scientific language. The analysis indicates that it is segmentation that is the basis for the emergence and functioning of typified constructions. These are constructions with anaphoric pronouns, asyndetic subordination, and parenthetical insertions, superposition constructions, interrogative constructions with an additional phrasal boundary, double verb constructions which vary in frequency across different genres and areas of spoken scientific language. The article concludes that teaching this communicative subject matter will be more effective if it is structured according to the principle of comparing and contrasting spoken-colloquial and literary-written linguistic means functioning in spoken scientific language. 

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