«Tipa» and «Takoj» as Quotative Markers in Russian

This paper is dedicated to the new Russian quotative markers takoj and tipa that have become particularly frequent in the colloquial speech over the last decade. At first glance, takoj and tipa seem to be interchangeable in the context of citation, as they have similar discursive function and stylistic features. However, the speaker’s preference of one or another marker is not accidental and may depend, among other things, on grammatical restrictions, which have become the main object of research in this paper. Based on the corpus distribution of takoj and tipa the hypotheses about the factors which may influence the usage frequency of markers have been put forward. After the statistical testing, the following parameters proved to be significant for the competition of takoj and tipa: gender of the speaker, personal forms of the quoted person, transmission of the quote with indirect or direct speech, forms of the verb that accompany the markers, and the realis/irrealis context of the utterance. The paper also proposes some findings regarding the actual position of the units on the scale of pragmaticalization. The study was based on the data from the oral subcorpus of Russian national corpus (RNC) and on the experimental data with acceptability judgements of Russian native speakers. Keywords: quotative markers, takoj, tipa, Russian