Communicative Coordination in the Use of Phonetic Variants of a Word in Russian (According to Corpus and Experimental Data)

Coordination in dialogue is one of the key mechanisms that lead to successful communication. Researchers have found out that there is coordination at different levels of language representation since there is a phenomenon called alignment. This research is aimed to find out if there is an alignment at phonetic level in Russian in cases when there are different pronunciation options for some words. To achieve this aim we have conducted an experiment and analysed some audio records provided by one of the radiostations. As stimuli words for the experiment there were chosen the following words: skuchno ‘boring’, skvorechnik ‘birdhouse’, bulochnaya ‘bakery’, konechno ‘of course’, poryadochniy ‘decent’, yaichnitsa ‘omelette’. The experiment consisted of two stages: independent reading of texts with stimuli and communication with another experiment participant. The second stage of the experiment was designed in terms of the referential communication method and the main communication goal for interlocutors was to complete a Map Task. The audio records that were chosen for analysis were 6 episodes of the podcast by Radio MAYAK radiostaion. We come up with the conclusion that communicative coordination in the use of phonetic variants of the words is not nessesary for successful communication and does not occur in all communicative situations. It mostly depends on the interlocutors and their individual susceptibility to the priming effect.