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Research Trends in Pragmatics and Discourse 
Analysis in the Field of Slavic Linguistics
Renee Perelmutter, Krzysztof E. Borowski
University of Kansas, 1445 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045,  
United States, rperel@ku.edu; University of Wisconsin–Madison,  
1220 Linden Dr, Madison, WI 53706, borowski3@wisc.edu
Članek obravnava novejše trende in usmeritve v raziskavah slovanskih jezikov, 
povezanih s pragmatiko in analizo diskurza. Znotraj podpodročja pragmatike 
obravnava raziskave ohranjanja dostojanstva/(ne)vljudnosti, sovražnega govora, 
govornih dejanj in pragmatike čustev. V poglavju o analizi diskurza so predstav -
ljeni pojmi, kot so diskurzni označevalci, dvojezičnost, deikse, evidentnost in 
stališče, humor, izmenjava govornih vlog in kritična diskurzivna analiza (KDA) 
oz. kritične diskurzivne študije (KDŠ). Izpostavljena so tudi področja, ki po -
trebujejo več slavističnih raziskav, in sicer ohranjanje dostojanstva in moč v 
institucionalnih kontekstih, pragmatika in učenje slovanskih jezikov kot drugih 
in tujih jezikov ter dvojezični oz. večjezični diskurz in pragmatika.
This article surveys recent trends and directions in pragmatics and discourse 
analysis-related research of Slavic languages. Within the subfield of pragmatics, 
the article surveys studies of facework/(im)politeness, hate speech, speech acts, 
and pragmatics of emotions. The discourse analysis section surveys such top -
ics as discourse markers, bilingualism, deixis, evidentiality and stance, humor, 
turn-taking, and critical discourse analysis (CDA) / critical discourse studies 
(CDS). The article also outlines areas in need of more research for Slavists – these 
include facework and power in institutional contexts, pragmatics and L2 learn -
ing of Slavic languages, and bilingual/multilingual discourse and pragmatics.
Ključne besede: pragmatika, analize diskurza, diskurzni označevalci, (ne)vlju -
dnost, kritične diskurzivne študije, slovansko jezikoslovje
Keywords: pragmatics, discourse analysis, discourse markers, (im)politeness, 
critical discourse studies, Slavic linguistics
1 Introduction
This article
1
 surveys the trends and new directions in the discourse and prag -
matics of Slavic languages in the past fifteen years, with a special emphasis on 
 1
 The authors are grateful to Stephen M. Dickey (KU SGES), with whom we discussed 
this review at its early stages. We are grateful to Marc L. Greenberg (KU SGES) for 
1.02 Pregledni znanstveni članek – 1.02 Review Article

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Renee Perelmutter, Krzysztof E. Borowski
the newest research and theoretical developments made using Slavic data in the 
Western academy. Until recently, there has been a disconnect between Eastern 
European and Western research on both pragmatics and discourse. Kosta and 
Thielemann (2004) observe that in many Slavic countries, the study of discourse 
primarily followed the Prague school. Grenoble also discusses this gap in the 
literature in her programmatic article on discourse analysis in the eighth issue 
of Glossos (2006), which collected articles from leading American Slavists 
who considered the state of the field and evaluated the future directions of 
Slavic linguistics in the Western academy. Grenoble’s article outlines the main 
trends in discourse analysis (illustrated with her own Russian discourse data) 
and suggests directions for future research. Throughout the article, Grenoble 
makes a powerful argument as to why Slavists, and American Slavists in par -
ticular, should turn their attention to the study of discourse, which requires a 
thorough knowledge of both the language under study and its cultural context. 
At the same time, she finds that few Slavic linguists have dedicated themselves 
to the study of discourse:
Much more work needs to be done not only on Russian, but on all Slavic languages. 
[…] Slavic data are seriously underrepresented, in particular in Western publications 
not aimed at a Slavic audience. At the same time, American Slavists (with a handful 
of notable exceptions) are largely absent from the field of discourse analysis. (Grenoble 
2006: 2)
Over fifteen years after the publication of Grenoble’s ‘Discourse Analysis,’ the 
body of work on Slavic pragmatics and discourse analysis has expanded, with 
scholars in Slavic-speaking countries increasingly using Western theoretical 
approaches to the study of discourse and pragmatics. As this article will show, 
significant work has been done in the 2000s, and even in the last 5-10 years, 
promising more theoretically important work to come.
In her 2006 article, Grenoble takes a broad view of what discourse analysis 
encompasses, including fields that arguably constitute subfields of linguistics 
rather than subfields of discourse analysis, including conversation analysis 
and pragmatics. Grenoble’s decision makes sense given how much overlap 
there often is between the various theoretical approaches to how language is 
used in context, including in naturally occurring face-to-face conversations, 
mediated contexts, institutional contexts, and more. We pay special attention 
to three avenues of inquiry within these disciplines: (1) the study of facework, 
which overlaps with the study of (im)politeness and power, and which is often 
a useful lens for the study of other domains, such as speech acts; (2) discourse 
suggesting we send it to Slavia Centralis, and to the editorial team of Slavia Centralis 
for their interest and feedback. Thanks to Bogi Perelmutter who provided proofreading 
and commentary. Above all, we are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, whose 
detailed constructive criticism helped us improve the article. Any remaining mistakes 
are ours alone.

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Research Trends in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in the Field of Slavic Linguistics
markers, which attracted an especially robust recent scholarly effort for Slavic; 
and (3) recent trends in discourse analysis, including turn-taking, statistical 
models, evidentiality, humor, and more. The article does not aim to present 
a comprehensive survey, but rather to discuss trends and developments in the 
study of pragmatics and discourse.
2 Methodology
In order to identify articles for this review, the authors used major academic 
search databases such as the MLA International Bibliography, American Bib -
liography of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Russian Academy 
of Sciences Bibliographies (via EBSCOHost), Anthropology Plus, JSTOR, 
Project Muse, and Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA). We 
searched for Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis as keywords, as well as for 
specific phenomena within these domains (such as politeness or turn-taking), 
combining these keywords with a search for specific Slavic languages. We also 
worked with Google Scholar to find articles that cited the articles we agreed 
to review. We supplemented our search by consulting the bibliographies of 
articles we selected for review. Our search retrieved many more articles than 
we would be able to review within this space. We primarily focused on articles 
published in the past 15 years, in English, within Western academic settings, 
and which we deemed to be especially influential and/or innovative. Since what 
is deemed influential and innovative can vary, we prioritised articles that had 
high citation numbers, which appeared in highly-ranked peer-reviewed journals 
(such as the Journal of Pragmatics) or in notable edited volumes from major 
presses. The article does not represent an exhaustive review of the field, and 
any remaining omissions are ours alone.
3 Trends in Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that deals with both language in 
use and the contexts in which language is used. Within the domain of prag -
matics, facework and (im)politeness represents a prominent area of research in 
interpersonal pragmatics, one which has been rapidly developing and to which 
Slavic linguists have contributed with major studies.
3.1 Facework and (Im)politeness
Goffman defines face as ‘the positive social value a person effectively claims 
for himself (sic)?? by the line others assume he (sic) has?? taken during a 
particular contact’ (Goffman 1967: 5). Influential works of Leech (1983) and 

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Brown and Levinson (1987) engaged with the Goffman’s notion of face by 
theorising how social face can be negotiated and maintained in conversation. 
Following the Gricean cooperative principle (1975/1989), both Leech (1983) 
and Brown and Levinson (1987) assume that interlocutors strive to cooperate 
in interaction, focusing their attention on politeness, or strategies to maintain 
or enhance social face in discourse.
Brown and Levinson (1987) outline positive and negative politeness strate -
gies: positive politeness addresses a person’s positive face wants, i.e., a person’s 
desire to be approved of by others, while negative politeness addresses a person’s 
negative face wants, i.e., the desire to be unhindered in one’s actions. Address -
ing negative face wants often involves the mitigation of face-threatening acts 
(FTAs), which can be accomplished through a variety of linguistic strategies. For 
example, a request is a potentially face-threatening act as it can inconvenience 
the receiver and thus threaten that person’s desire for independence. To mitigate 
the FTA of requesting, a variety of linguistic strategies, such as indirectness and 
hedging, are used. The authors thus do not consider direct requests polite. Though 
Brown and Levinson include some comparative linguistic material in Politeness 
(1987), critics called for research into the pragmatics of non-Anglo-Western lan -
guages in order to test and challenge the ideas cross-culturally (cf. Eelen 2001).
As Eelen (2001) and other critiques of politeness theories have pointed 
out, a fair amount of cross-cultural variation exists in terms of the discursive 
negotiation of politeness (for detailed critique, cf. Al-Hindawi 2016). Slavic 
politeness in particular deviates from Anglo-Western norms, prompting engage -
ment from researchers. Thus, Zemskaja’s (1997) article provided an overview of 
the Russian category of politeness and a discussion of the specifically Russian 
features of politeness. Directness/indirectness in discourse (e.g., in requests and 
other speech acts) has been consistently identified as a major point of differ -
ence between Slavic and Anglo-Western politeness paradigms. Larina’s (2009) 
monograph provides a detailed descriptive analysis of the Russian category of 
politeness. Larina relies on the familiar Brown and Levinson (1987) notion of 
face wants while discussing cultural differences. She also engages with the 
notion of social proximity as central to Russian communication, juxtaposing it 
to what she perceives as Western individualism and distance. This discussion 
is then used to explain why in Russian, direct requests can be polite (cf. Mills 
1992 for discussion of Russian indirect requesting strategies). Wierzbicka (1985) 
makes similar claims about direct requests and politeness in Polish.
However, other studies show that directness is only sometimes cooperative, 
and indirectness can be appropriate/polite. For example, direct advice-giving, an 
FTA according to Brown and Levinson (1987), can be cooperative, friendly, and 
positive in Russian culture (Alekseeva 1990; Belyaeva 1996). However, advice 
can also be undesired and viewed as an imposition and can be threatening if 
a power differential is involved, as in Perelmutter’s (2010) discussions of face 
threats in situations where an authority figure gives unsolicited advice to a 
person with lesser power.

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Research Trends in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in the Field of Slavic Linguistics
The notion of closeness or proximity in Russian culture may be further 
nuanced by introducing the positive notion of semejnyj ‘family-like’ attitude 
in discourse. In Rathmayr’s (2009) article on new Russian politeness, one of 
the informants discusses how sellers in small magazines, boutiques, or mar -
kets can develop positive relationships with their clients by combining a warm 
attitude with nenavjazčivyj sovet ‘non-coercive advice’ about their products. 
The informant calls such relationships polusemejnye ‘semi-familial’. The folk 
notions of semejnyj ‘family-like’, as opposed to chuzhoj, postoronnij ‘outsider’ 
approaches, influence reception. Certain people are ratified to use specific 
potentially face-threatening speech acts, and to use specific encodings of those 
speech acts (e.g., to give direct advice) in certain circumstances, such as social 
proximity or a familial relationship. However, the acceptability of direct advice 
as polite should not be applied to the culture as a whole.
Discussions of facework and (im)politeness in East-Central European con -
texts represent a significant gap in the literature. Ogiermann and Suszczyńska 
(2011) use semi-structured interviews with Hungarians and Poles to look into 
sociocultural norms of what is considered (im)polite, as well as how such ideas 
may have changed after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The authors find that posi -
tive politeness—which the authors claim is traditionally more significant and 
preferred in the Polish context—has been in the process of losing importance in 
favour of negative politeness since 1989. In addition to this, Poles’ definitions 
of what is considered im/polite behaviour include few references to verbal im/
politeness or language in general. This finding may partly explain why aggres -
sive language is better tolerated in Poland than in other European countries (cf. 
the Discourse Analysis section in this chapter).
A detailed investigation of Polish norms of politeness can be found in Ogier -
mann (2012). The author states that there is a strong focus on maintaining a 
positive face in selected speech acts – such as Polish apologies, which tend to 
be overly effusive and personal, unlike their English equivalents characterised 
by vagueness and distance. Contrary to previous findings (Marcjanik 1997; 
Wierzbicka 1985, 1993), Ogiermann argues that Polish politeness is based more 
on effusiveness and emotionality than on directness. The study suggests that 
Poles do not perceive interpersonal communication as a potential face threat, 
but rather as an opportunity to make themselves available to each other. This 
finding is supported by evidence from requests in Polish that tend to exaggerate 
rather than diminish the hearer’s contribution, e.g., Mam do Ciebie ogromną 
prośbę. ‘I have a huge favour to ask you. ’ (Ogiermann 2012: 44)
Earlier authors like Leech (1983) considered conflict discourse to be mar -
ginal in communication. Interest in impoliteness has been rapidly expanding 
after the publication of Culpeper’s famous 1996 article ‘Towards an Anatomy of 
Impoliteness,’ which criticised Brown and Levinson’s paradigm for side-lining 
impoliteness. Culpeper (1996) relies on taxonomies developed for politeness 
research to study impoliteness. However, Culpeper later revised and nuanced 
his approach (e.g., Culpeper et al. 2003; Culpeper 2011), suggesting along with 

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many other scholars that impoliteness is both pervasive in human interaction 
and needs to be studied separately from politeness, using approaches developed 
for it (Bousfield et al. 2008; cf. a recent and thorough discussion in Dynel 2013).
The study of impoliteness and conflict discourse received a further boost 
from the observation that conflict is commonplace in mediated contexts, espe -
cially in online contexts such as blogs and blog comments, forums, YouTube 
comments, social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Vkontakte, etc.; and in 
other mediated and often performative contexts such as televised political 
debates, reality TV shows, and more (for Slavic, see e.g., Perelmutter 2010, 
2013, 2015; Furman 2016). In mediated contexts, especially on the Internet, 
multi-participant rather than dyadic discourse is often the norm. The way 
multiple people engage in conflict discourse online often differs significantly 
from dyadic, face-to-face contexts; thus tools developed for such contexts do 
not necessarily suffice to describe the data. Some linguists, including Slavists, 
have been developing new theoretical approaches to study multi-participant 
conflict discourse in mediated contexts (cf. Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2011).
Mediated contexts present rich datasets for the study of affiliation and 
disaffiliation strategies, which are especially important in multi-participant 
discourse. Here, the boundaries between politeness and impoliteness can be 
blurred when interlocutors use facework to both disaffiliate from opponents 
and build alliances with other interlocutors. Studying flamewars in the Russian 
blogosphere, Perelmutter (2013) shows how two interlocutors bond over their use 
of the third person singular pronoun to refer to a third interlocutor who is pres -
ent in the discussion but is symbolically excluded from it. Solidarity is explored 
in Furman’s (2016) investigation of impoliteness and mock impoliteness in the 
Russian TV show Dom Dva. He explores a variety of impolite strategies from 
insults to mock impoliteness used to signal solidarity. Furman finds that mock 
impoliteness can be used in an affiliative manner, e.g., in same-sex bonding, 
flirting, and ritualised banter between the participants of the show, and even 
between the show host and the participants.
Perelmutter’s (2018) article on online discourse, impoliteness, and globalisa -
tion in an online community for Russian-speaking Israelis demonstrates how 
the choices of linguistic code (Modern Russian, Hebrew, and the new immi -
grant vernacular Israeli Russian) play out in a multiparticipant online conflict. 
When participants use Israeli Russian, they in-group other forum members who 
share this vernacular – and their migrant experiences. Refraining from sharing 
this common immigrant vernacular with a participant during online conflict 
constitutes an Ignore, Snub the Other impoliteness strategy – other members 
are essentially disaffiliating from their opponent, denying this person common 
experiences and linguistic code. Patterns of affiliation and disaffiliation in this 
online community can also be observed through the choice of usernames or 
nicks, and how these nicks can be manipulated during conflict discourse – e.g., 
translated, diminutivised, and commented on – to index Jewish Russian and 
migrant identities (Perelmutter 2021).

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Research Trends in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in the Field of Slavic Linguistics
Genre expectations add an important dimension to (im)polite encounters 
online: thus, Perelmutter (2013) shows that a flamewar has recognisable moves 
that participants are expected to follow. Similarly, studying online complaint 
discourse (Perelmutter 2010) and conflictual confessions of marital infidelity 
(Perelmutter 2015) in women’s online communities demonstrates the interaction 
between genre expectations, performance, and facework in multiparticipant 
contexts.
Humour is a frequently encountered resource in the pragmatics of Slavic 
discourse, in both mediated and face-to-face encounters. Mažara (2013) analy -
ses Czech TV talk shows to show how they incorporate verbal irony as a prag -
matic resource to perform facework strategies. Thus, within the institutional 
context of televised debates, irony can be used to attack a political opponent’s 
positive and negative face, protect one’s negative face, and enhance one’s own 
positive face (see also the discussion of humour as a resource under Trends in 
Discourse Analysis).
3.2 Facework, (Im)politeness, and Power
A crucial and yet relatively underexplored direction of (im)politeness research 
is the influence of institutionalised social power upon the pragmatic strategies 
used by interlocutors. Scholars do not always agree on how to interpret verbal 
aggression by an institutionally ratified speaker (e.g., a policeman) towards a 
speaker without such power. Keinpointner (2008) suggests that institutional 
impoliteness can be ratified, expected – e.g., police officers addressing civil -
ians, army officers addressing recruits, employers addressing employees – 
discursively employing ‘legitimate power’ (Dynel 2013; cf. also Eelen 2001; 
Mullany 2008). According to Dynel (2013), such ratified aggression may be 
interpreted not as impoliteness, but rather as the bald-on-record politeness 
strategy as described by Brown and Levinson (1983 (cf. also the discussion 
in Culpeper 2011). Institutionally ratified speech; however, may be interpreted 
as a face attack by certain interlocutors, and hierarchy and power in discourse 
can be tested and challenged, disrupted, and even completely disratified in 
some instances.
Recent research using Slavic data adds important dimensions to the study 
of the interaction between (im)politeness and institutional power. Thus, a re -
cent article by Márquez Reiter et al. (2016) examines how Russian motorists 
respond to traffic stops by police officers; the motorists record the interactions 
via dashboard cameras and upload them on YouTube, providing examples 
for other motorists who wish to counteract perceived problems of corruption 
among officers. By analysing counter-questions that motorists pose to officers 
in response to requests for identification, the authors present a nuanced and 
theoretically important analysis of how institutional power (in this case, that of 
police personnel) can be challenged and disrupted, and the distinction between 

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personal and institutional face and power concerns can be blurred. In a similar 
vein, Cerović (2016) investigates the use of rhetorical questions as a way to 
challenge and disrupt institutional authority in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS, 
‘Serbo-Croatian’ in the article) encounters between crime suspects and the 
detectives who interrogate them. Just like in the Márquez Reiter (2016) paper 
above, Cerović effectively demonstrates how power-holders can be challenged 
in institutional discourse. Detectives respond with disapproval (recognising 
the implicit power challenge in rhetorical questions), but can sometimes treat 
a rhetorical question as genuine if it suits their institutional goals.
Another interesting and rapidly developing field of study which touches 
on institutional power is the study of doctor-patient interactions, which are a 
subtype of institutionalised discourse in which one of the interlocutors (the 
medical professional) has significantly more power over the patient. Scholarship 
on doctor-patient communication in Slavic languages has only recently been 
gaining ground, even though this is a well-established topic in the fields of 
conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and pragmatics in the Anglo-Western 
context. Given the scarce interest in medical discourse overall (but see Boniecka 
2004), the book-long study by Stefaniak (2011) represents a significant step 
forward. The author takes a sociopragmatic approach to the ideas of identity 
and power asymmetry in patient-doctor medical encounters. Stefaniak dem -
onstrates that doctor-patient communication is indeed asymmetrical and that 
both parties interactionally cooperate with each other in order to sustain rela -
tions of asymmetry. The results show that due to the cultural underpinnings of 
doctor-patient relations in Poland, patients employ various mitigation strategies 
in their conversations with doctors. For example, patients make requests by 
adding them to the response to a question previously asked by the doctor. Since 
requests position patients as experts, they represent imminent face threats to the 
authority of the doctor. In order to minimise this effect, patients postpone their 
requests until the very end of the conversation. Furthermore, their requests are 
indirect and hedged, as evidenced in the use of the conditional voice combined 
with impersonal constructions (cf. the example below, from Stefaniak 2011: 
160; emphases original, translation KEB):
(1)
(Patient) Mnie to przydałoby się panie doktorze,
 Doctor (m., V-form), I could really use,
 [chy]ba, wyniki porobić.
 I guess, some tests [to do].
(Doctor) [No:]
 Yeah:
 No to w następnym y: miesiącu.
 Next uh: month then.
The face-threatening aspect of requests in medical discourse is further elabo -
rated in Stefaniak (2010) where the author focuses on patients’ self-assessments 

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Research Trends in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in the Field of Slavic Linguistics
as potential face-threatening acts. To mitigate this threat, patients defer to 
mitigation strategies of hedges, bushes, or shields (Caffi 2007) while doctors 
use power strategies of interruptions, topic change, or silence. Such power 
moves, Stefaniak argues, signal the doctor’s responses to infringements of the 
power asymmetry typical for a medical encounter, and represent the doctor’s 
direct response to FTAs performed by the patient (Stefaniak 2010: 289–290).
Stefaniak (2011) finds gender to be a significant factor in doctor-patient 
communication. For instance, women tend to be more active participants in 
such conversations, but they use mitigation strategies more frequently when 
performing FTAs. However, when women do not use mitigation strategies, 
doctors defer to power strategies more often than in conversations with men. 
Finally, the level of doctor-patient asymmetry for women patients – as measured 
by how often doctors use power strategies (such as interrupting or changing 
the topic of the conversation) in interactions with patients – is reduced only in 
encounters with women doctors.
Finally, Weidner (2015) examines the Polish Proszę (mi) powiedzieć ‘Please 
tell (me)’ construction in doctor-patient communication by studying the inter -
face between interlocutors’ deontic or epistemological stances and turn-taking. 
The results show that only two such constructions were found in utterances 
produced by the patient, which may indicate the existence of unspoken rules as 
to who has the authority to produce directives in medical encounters. Finally, 
the same author examines the epistemic potential of Polish aha (Weidner, 
2016a) in both medical discourse and naturally occurring phone conversations, 
demonstrating that it encodes cognitive changes of state. In this capacity, aha 
can signal revelation, now-understanding (with aha quantitatively longer than 
in the next category), or change in informedness (Weidner 2016a: 197).
A number of important studies of doctor-patient interactions in Polish have 
been conducted by Sowińska, focusing on such topics as narratives of patients 
struggling with medically unexplained symptoms (2018) (see also under The 
Pragmatics of Emotions) and narratives of vicarious experience embedded in 
the speech of Polish doctors (Sowińska and Sokół 2018).
3.4 Impoliteness and Hate Speech
An eminent trend in recent research focuses on the emergent and important 
political phenomenon of hate speech, especially in online media. A noteworthy 
contribution here is the volume edited by Kopytowska (2017), with a focus 
on hate speech in various international contexts. In another study, Baider and 
Kopytowska (2017) analyse metaphors in Cypriot Greek- and Polish-language 
comments about immigration. Their analysis shows that while the metaphor 
of INVASION is present in both datasets, Polish data from the pragmatic 
point of view tends to be more direct and offensive. Similarly, Lewandowska-
Tomaszczyk (2017) compares English- and Polish-language data on uncivil 

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behaviour to find that in the Polish context, offensive language finds more 
support amongst Internet users.
Looking at the intersection of argumentation and aggression, Kuße (2018) 
analyzes popular discourse about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict before the 
2022 Russian invasion. Focusing on different genres—from language and po -
etry to multimodal political maps—the author traces aggressive reasons and 
theses as part-and-parcel of argumentative communication. Kuße finds that in 
the case of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, aggressive argumentation has to do 
with centripetal (on the Russian side) and centrifugal (on the Ukrainian side) 
discursive tendencies. As the author suggests, ‘the enemy is not the stranger’ in 
this case study, but the person ‘who wants to live and exist separately’ (Kuße 
2018: 61), feeding the ongoing conflict even more.
Exploring the link between hate speech and discursive othering, Kopy -
towska, Grabowski, and Woźniak (2017) examine proximisation mechanisms 
by comparing online news articles and comments about migrants and refugees. 
The authors point to how certain deictic features (for instance, the use of the 
proximal ci ‘these’) and metaphors (for instance, of water ) facilitate the spatio-
temporal proximisation of migrants and refugees in the mediated experience 
of Internet users. The study concludes that representations of such groups are 
encouraged by the negative characteristics included in their descriptions, which 
are further developed and elaborated upon in comment sections where com -
menters use more aggressive language and introduce representations (e.g., the 
dehumanising metaphors of ‘savages’ or ‘beasts’) absent in the articles them -
selves. According to the authors, the increased presence of verbal violence in 
the comment sections analysed is caused by the above-mentioned strategies of 
proximisation, and cannot merely be attributed to the conservative profile of 
the online news portal examined.
Kuße (2019) investigates the phenomenon of verbal violence masked behind 
diffuse messages in Russian-language political communication, drawing on 
examples from the Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, and Putin eras. The author defines 
diffuse communication as ‘messages (…) characterised by an unclear illocution -
ary and/or axiological direction’ (Kuße 2019: 24) and focuses on seemingly 
positive or neutral terms that mask what is otherwise hostile communication. 
In the study, these terms include words such as ‘friend,’ ‘brothers,’ ‘security,’ 
and ‘freedom,’ but also the phrase odin narod or ‘one people’ when used to talk 
about Ukrainians and Russians. Kuße concludes that diffuse political communi -
cation is typical for authoritarian and totalitarian systems, and that diffuseness 
as a language feature is aggressive when it becomes an instrument of power.
Recent years have brought about an interest in pragmatically informed stud -
ies of political discourse as yet another research trend. For instance, Trajkova 
and Neshkovska (2018) analyse online hate speech on Macedonian social media 
ahead and after the 2016 parliamentary elections. Looking at the intersection of 
hateful speech, stancetaking, and politics, the authors identify several discursive 
stances taken by online posters on Facebook and Twitter. The most common 

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Research Trends in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in the Field of Slavic Linguistics
stance is that of Analyst & Judge, identified in 65% of the examples. Posters 
in this category not only analyse specific political contexts, but also provide 
readers with their subjective explanations. The authors finds that in Macedonian 
social media discourse, power is commonly exerted through negativity, leading 
to numerous instances of hateful speech, with which elite and nonelite politi -
cal actors hope to influence public opinion. Additionally, while in a numerical 
minority, some posters engaged in analysis, judging, and activism.
In another study, Trajkova (2020) studies the public discourse in pro- and 
anti-government media in Macedonian across the period leading up to and 
shortly after the change of the country’s official change to the Republic of North 
Macedonia in early 2019. The author finds that the trope of fear was commonly 
employed by both pro- and anti-government media to frame the name change 
from drastically opposing perspectives. While the former sources used threaten -
ing language to highlight the negative consequences of not ratifying the name 
change, the opposing sources represented the name change as a catastrophic 
event resulting in a loss of identity and nation for the Macedonian people.
3.5 (Im)politeness and Speech Acts
The study of speech acts developed following Austin’s Speech Act Theory 
(1962); it examines the uses of language to perform specific acts (e.g., swearing 
an oath, cursing, congratulating, apologising). Speech acts have increasingly 
been studied in combination with facework and (im)politeness, as specific 
speech acts are mobilised to both enact and mitigate face-threatening acts in 
discourse. Late 1990s and 2000s saw a number of full-length studies focusing on 
particular Slavic speech acts (advice, apologies, requests) in the context of po -
liteness theories. Thus, Rathmayr’s (1996) study uses politeness theory to study 
Russian apologies; this study has been criticised for being oriented towards 
an older generation of speakers (Nikolaeva, 2000). Ogiermann’s book-length 
study from 2009 investigates apologising in Polish and Russian and contrasts 
the speech act of apology in these languages with English. Ogiermann shows 
that Polish and Russian apologies (especially the so-called remedial apologies) 
correlate with a positive face; she argues that apologies are less face-threatening 
for Polish and Russian speakers than they are for speakers of English. In a 
recent study, Kravchenko and Blidchenko-Naiko (2020) explore the pragmat -
ics of the indirect speech act of justification in Ukrainian conversational data 
using the framework of (im)politeness and facework. The authors identify two 
distinct patterns of justification use: one pattern is used to attempt to prevent 
a face-threatening act from being delivered by an interlocutor; the other is a 
strategy that speakers use to repair after they deliver a speech-threatening act.
Apologies as speech acts have also been studied in professional and business 
discourse. For instance, Tereszkiewicz (2020) examines complaint management 
in online Polish interactions between customers and companies on Twitter. 

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Comparing two corpora (2015 and 2017), the author identifies several changes in 
the pragmatic character of such interactions. As the study shows, the frequency 
in the use of the first name increased over time while the corresponding usage 
of V-forms of address decreased. A novel tendency observed in the 2017 corpus 
was the use of nicknames in forms of address. In the later corpus, the number 
of apologies doubled, as did the number of offers of help or repair. Apology-
specific forms such as Przepraszamy ‘We apologise’ and Przykro nam ‘We are 
sorry’ were also more often used in the later dataset. The author concludes that 
over the period examined, a noticeable shift toward a more customer-centred 
and customer-oriented discourse occurred. The data also demonstrates a shift 
toward more formulaic and standardised features, suggesting that the companies 
analysed adopted a more accommodative stance in their communication with 
customers, in line with more global trends of globalisation.
In addition to various domains, apologies are also a subject of study from a 
comparative, Slavic–non-Slavic perspective. In that vein, Suszczyńska (1999) 
offers a comparative account of apology formulas in English, Hungarian, and 
Polish. Using a discourse completion test, the author finds that for Polish 
speakers, the generic Przepraszam ‘I apologise’ represents the most commonly 
employed IFID (Illocutionary Force Indicating Device) with 291 occurrences 
in the data, more than three times that of the other three formulas combined 
(Przykro mi ‘Sorry’ , Wybacz ‘Forgive’, Nie gniewaj się ‘Don’t be angry’). Królak 
and Rudnicka (2006) analyze requests and orders in Polish. The authors suggest 
that diminutives reduce the emotional distance between the speaker and the 
hearer while simultaneously lowering the potential cost of the action for the 
hearer; e.g., Chodź tu na chwileczkę. ‘Come here for a while.
DIM.DIM
’ (Królak 
and Rudnicka 2006: 131). Mišić Ilić and Radulović (2015) examine commissive 
illocutionary acts in American, British, and Serbian political speeches. The 
study finds that when making commitments, politicians do so implicitly most 
of the time, avoiding direct responsibility and attempting to keep their public 
image at the expense of the promises made.
Cross-linguistic comparative studies also emerge at the intersection of 
discourse, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics. In one example, Góralczyk 
and Łozińska (2021) take a cognitive linguistic perspective on how Polish and 
Russian grammars encode directive meaning in yoga discourse. The authors 
find that when it comes to giving instructions, Polish speakers almost equally 
use imperative and non-past indicative constructions, while Russian speakers 
favour the latter much more over imperative and past indicative forms. Unlike 
in Russian, past indicative forms are absent from Polish-language discourse, 
despite there being a similar morphosyntactic pattern available. According to 
the authors, this discrepancy can be explained by the greater systemic diversity 
of directives in Russian, which provides users with more fine-grained distinc -
tions when it comes to the impact of the directives.

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3.6 The Pragmatics of Emotions
An underexplored and potentially fruitful direction of research involves the 
pragmatics of emotions in Slavic and in cross-cultural perspective. Thus, An -
drews and Krenmayr (2007) examine anger in German and Russian from cross-
cultural semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Jing-Schmidt and Kapatsinski’s 
(2012) inquiry into the pragmatics of ‘the apprehensive’ in English, Mandarin, 
and Russian studies fear expressions that serve pragmatic purposes (such as 
boius’, ja ne mogu soglasit’sja ‘I am afraid I cannot agree’). Sowińska’s (2014) 
study of doctor-patient interactions shows how doctors use strategies such as 
distancing-mitigation and self-justification when constructing such emotions 
as frustration and impatience towards patients with medically unexplained 
symptoms. Apresjan (2013) uses corpus methodology to test assumptions made 
in cross-cultural pragmatics about emotional etiquette in Russian and English. 
Some hypotheses did not bear out (e.g., pity does not appear to be central), but 
others were confirmed (e.g., ‘shame’ is central in Russian). Kurtyka (2019) looks 
at the pragmatic function of indirect complaints in spoken Polish and finds that 
they exhibit mostly affiliative functions, strengthen ties between interlocutors, 
and allow for venting without the need to offer advice.
4 Discourse Analysis
While both pragmatics and discourse analysis study language in use, pragmatics 
pays attention to how context influences meaning, while discourse analysis is 
a set of methodological approaches to studying language beyond the sentence 
level. Discourse analysts study larger units of texts and examine how they may 
be organised, for example through such means as discourse markers. Discourse 
Analysis can also be used to relate language to social context, and this is es -
pecially relevant in the case of Critical Discourse Analysis.
4.1 Discourse Markers
Discourse markers (Schiffrin 1988) are a difficult-to-define and often elusive 
category of linguistic units which can be used to structure discourse. The 
study of discourse markers represents one of the most fruitful areas of research 
within Slavic especially using South and West Slavic data. While earlier at -
tempts at describing the meaning and/or function(s) of discourse markers were 
mostly grounded in prescriptive and standard-biased approaches to the study 
of language (Mišković-Luković and Dedaić 2010), the last two decades have 
witnessed an upsurge in scholarship that applies novel theories to previously 
understudied Slavic data.

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In South Slavic, the volume edited by Dedaić and Mišković-Luković (2010) 
represents a significant contribution to the field. In the introduction, the edi -
tors claim that there is a tendency to neglect discourse markers due to their 
semantic ambiguity and associations with nonstandard speech. In the chapters 
that follow, several authors propose new approaches to discourse markers in 
Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Slovene. Premilovac 
(2010) offers a new interpretation of the Bosnian ono as a discourse particle, 
typically perceived as a filler word. While ono can function as a demonstra -
tive, non-demonstrative usage of the particle encodes the speaker’s intent for 
the utterance produced to be interpreted in a non-evidential manner. Consider 
the following example given by Premilovac (2010: 98):
(2)
Zamisli nas, ono non-stop zimi sjedimo u autu.
‘Imagine us, ono non-stop in the winter we sit in the car. ’
The activity of sitting in the car is not to be taken literally, but rather figuratively 
as a metaphor of wintertime monotony. In this way, ono allows the speaker to 
avoid responsibility for untrue and/or inadequate claim(s) by signalling that the 
utterance that follows needs to be interpreted loosely.
Fielder (2010) examines the Bulgarian ama. Using a corpus of contemporary 
spoken Bulgarian and the nineteenth-century comic novel Baj Ganjo, the author 
finds that ama is used as both a discourse marker and adversative conjunction, 
both historically and currently. In the latter function, ama plays an interactional 
role by indexing the speaker’s adversative reaction to preceding discourse or 
an extralinguistic element. Dedaić (2010) investigates the functions of Croatian 
dakle in discourse and classifies them as conclusional, reformulational, argu -
mentative/rhetorical, and attitudinal. Sévigny (2010) analyzes the Macedonian 
kamo as an attitudinal discourse marker that encodes the speaker’s attitudes 
and beliefs. Depending on the prosodic information used, kamo can signal a 
wide range of feelings, from irritation to frustration (e.g., Kamo masa? ‘Isn’t 
there any table here?’, Sévigny 2010: 54). The discourse marker can also index 
the speaker’s disbelief (cf. the example below). Overall, the author argues that 
kamo in Macedonian functions as a dissociative marker that allows the speaker 
to produce an indirect effect of irony or irritation, amplified by the prosodic 
information accompanying it in discourse (Sévigny 2010: 56–57):
(3)
– Vidi, ete ga tsarinata!
‘Look, there is the Czarina!’
– Kamo?
‘Where?’ [I don’t see her and I don’t believe you see her either. Show her to me.]
In another chapter of this volume, Mišković-Luković (2010) investigates the Ser -
bian particles baš and kao with regard to the process of conceptual adjustment. 

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The author concludes that while the former signals literal resemblance, the latter 
encodes less-than-literal resemblance between the literal and intended meaning 
(Mišković-Luković 2010: 75, 81). The two particles seem to be working in op -
posite directions, as the baš explicature is usually strong while the kao one is 
typically weak, and, in this character, resembles the loose propositional inter -
pretation signalled by the Bosnian ono (see above). Thus, baš and kao represent 
two opposite spectrums in terms of how an utterance is to be interpreted, with 
baš encoding literalness and kao indexing its lack and, consequently, loose talk.
These observations about the pragmatic import of baš confirm conclusions 
made in an earlier study. In Miskovic (2001), the author examined the Serbian 
particle baš from a relevance perspective and proposed that baš does not in-
fluence the truth condition of the proposition and that the particle contributes 
to the explicature of the utterance by narrowing and specifying the scope of 
the particle.
In the last study included in the South Slavic discourse particles volume, 
Žagar (2010) explores the role of the Slovene pa in compound connectives ker pa 
and sicer pa. The author concludes that pa performs the role of an interactional 
device that allows the speaker to activate background knowledge in discourse.
Aside from this volume, research on South Slavic discourse markers and 
particles has been ongoing in other works as well. For instance, Halupka-Rešetar 
and Radić-Bojanić (2014) analyse the Serbian discourse marker znači and iden-
tify its functions in discourse: reformulational, concluding, and interactional. 
The authors posit that znači serves as a pragmatic guidepost, orienting the 
hearer toward the contextual effect intended by the speaker. Dedaić (2005) ex -
amines the fuzzy semantics of the Croatian discourse marker tobože. This study 
shows that the marker has an interactional character, allowing interlocutors to 
negotiate the speaker-hearer social roles. Focusing on the role of tobože-marked 
opinions and statements, the author argues that they either indicate rejection 
of those opinions (the hearer role) or index a stance in contradiction to those 
statements (the speaker role). Dedaić proposes a pragmatic interpretation of 
tobože, according to which the discourse marker encodes echo, denial, and 
irony: it echoes a previously stated idea, it rejects and mocks that idea (Dedaić 
2005: 675). In this way, the Croatian tobože becomes a discursive tool of dis -
association, allowing the speaker to both produce off-the-record criticism and 
avoid direct responsibility.
Additional and more recent studies concerning BCS discourse markers in 
major pragmatics journals include an excellent study of the Serbian discourse 
marker bre by Mišković-Luković et al. (20 15), which uses a corpus collected 
from Serbian newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. The authors analyse 
how bre contributes to the interpretation of the utterance as a whole, through 
the framework of relevance theory. Bre can signal the speaker’s expectation that 
the addressee will disapprove of the speaker’s utterance; the usage of bre signals 
that the forthcoming utterance will be controversial, but that the speaker thinks 
it is the right thing to do/think. Mišković-Luković and Dedaić (2012) investigate 

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the BCS discourse marker odnosno (‘that is, ’ ‘in other words’), discussing the 
semantics and pragmatics of odnosno in the International Criminal Tribunal’s 
war testimonies. The polysemy of odnosno has been discussed by judges and 
others in the context of the tribunal. The scholars identify two pragmatic mean -
ings of odnosno: reformulatory and distributive.
Linguists working with Polish data have also been studying discourse mark -
ers. Works by Matuszewska (2014), Sawicki (2016), and Weidner (2016b) tackle 
the Polish particle no in three different contexts: children’ s spoken discourse, 
literary dialogues, and doctor-patient interactions. Matuszewska (2014) posits 
that the particle may ‘represent a source of knowledge about the speaker’s inner 
world as well as the way they perceive reality’ (Matuszewska 2014: 160), and 
that it may index emotional attitudes toward the topic of the conversation as 
well as the hearer. Sawicki (2016) identifies several (both responsive and non-
responsive) functions of the Polish no, concluding that in the initial position, 
the particle encodes a range of roles – from acknowledgment to agreement – as 
far as the content of the previous turn goes. Finally, Weidner (2016b) proposes 
that no be viewed in a stratal fashion as a discourse particle that both serves as 
an epistemic acknowledgment of the previous turn and indexes the speaker’s 
evaluation of the content.
Looking at no-prefaced instances ( no właśnie, no oczywiście, no wiem) in 
doctor-patient conversations, Weidner (2013) explores the function of the Pol -
ish particle no as an epistemic evaluation marker. The analysis shows that the 
particle plays an interactive role in discourse, allowing both the doctor and the 
patient to index their epistemic rights and to position those rights with regard to 
their interlocutors’. The author suggests that the function of no seems to have a 
direct link with knowledge and epistemic status and that in its most immediate 
function, no serves as an interactive marker of acknowledgment of previously 
contributed information in the conversation.
In two other studies, Adamczyk (2015, 2017) examines the pragmatic-
semantic interface of the Polish jakby and gdzieś tam, respectively. In the 
former, the author argues that jakby as a pragmatic marker performs multiple 
functions, from facilitating floor-holding to introducing explanations of previ -
ously expressed thoughts. In the latter, Adamczyk suggests that gdzieś tam 
‘somewhere there’ is currently undergoing pragmatic expansion from hedging 
to non-hedging functions, and identifies the following roles: vagueness marker, 
mitigator of illocutionary force, mitigator of stylistic anomaly, and marker of 
concept framing.
Bocale (2019) further adds to the discussion on discourse markers by in -
vestigating the Polish distal particle tam ‘there’ and its potential development 
as a discourse marker. The author identifies several pragmatic meanings for 
the particle, which include modal contexts, negations, non-declarative speech 
acts, indefiniteness, approximation, disjunctive coordination, and evidentiality. 
According to the author, the common feature for all of these seems to be the 
act of conveying irrealis meaning (Bocale 2019: 102):

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Research Trends in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in the Field of Slavic Linguistics
(4)
Ale wiesz co, ja, autentycznie, ja słyszałam Miodka w jakimś TAM programie, kiedy 
mówił, że ustalają sobie językoznawcy na jakichś TAM kongresach i to jest uzależnione 
często od frekwencji użycia.
‘But you know what, I really heard [Jan] Miodek in some TAM program when he said 
that linguists establish it at some TAM congresses, and that it is o ften dependent on 
the frequency of use.’
A number of excellent recent studies of discourse markers address Russian 
data. Kiseleva and Paillard’s volume (2003) collects a number of studies of 
Russian ‘discourse words’ and their functions, including nikak, vidimo, podi, 
and more. Bolden (2016) examines the Russian discourse marker nu, very 
frequent in the conversational context. The author presents nu as a discursive 
alert device signalling that a disjunction in discourse is about to happen. As 
an interactional device, nu thus alerts the speaker that ‘what is coming up 
is not the appropriate, unproblematic, expected next – and the recipient then 
has to figure out what it is that is inappropriate, problematic, or unexpected 
about it’ (Bolden 2016: 77). Marshall’s (2002) unpublished dissertation exam -
ines ved’, zhe, and -to, their function as discourse markers, and the necessity 
to incorporate discourse markers into L2 instruction. Rezanova and Kogut 
(2015) use statistical methods to examine discourse markers in scientific texts 
in Russian and German.
Kolyaseva (2018, 2021) investigated Russian discourse markers tipa and 
vrode in tw o recen t arti c l es in th e J o urnal o f Pragma ti cs . K o l y ase v a ( 2 0 1 8 ) 
analyses the discourse of young Russian speakers at an online forum for stu -
dents ‘Overheard at Moscow State University (MSU)’ to construct a typology 
of pragmatic functions of the discourse marker tipa ‘quasi, like, sort of’ . This 
discourse marker, the author argues, serves as a type of quotative in informal 
student discourse. Kolyaseva (2021) again investigates the group ‘Overheard 
at MSU’, conducting a large-scale study of comments to posts in this social 
media group, which comprised a dataset containing approximately 630,000 
words. The study focused on particles tipa ‘quasi, like, sort of’ and vrode 
‘like’ which cannot necessarily be used synonymously. The article argues that 
both particles are used to mark evidentiality and epistemic modality, but with 
divergent functions. Vrode marks uncertainty , and a mismatch between what 
is expected and reality while tipa can serve a quotative function or acts as a 
marker of doubt or approximation.
There have been a number of studies focusing on discourse markers that 
express hesitation. Thus, Laitinen (2013) contributes to the research of para -
linguistic resources in interaction by studying hesitation markers. Using a 
corpus of Russian TV talk shows, Laitinen argues that hesitation is a discourse-
cognitive category. Hesitation markers include metacognitive/metalinguistic 
phrases (e.g., kak èto skazat’ ‘how to say’), lexical markers indicating that a 
search for a word is underway ( nu ‘well’), pauses, prolonged syllables, repeti -
tion of prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions, and more. Laitinen shows 

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Renee Perelmutter, Krzysztof E. Borowski
that the usage of hesitation markers plays a role in organising discourse; in 
telling sequences, hesitation marks shifts in narration, allowing the speakers 
to attend to interactional aspects of telling and re-orient as necessary. Hlavac 
(2011) studies hesitation and monitoring phenomena (HMPs) in Croatian and 
English. HMPs are paralinguistic markers like nervous laughter, filled and un -
filled pauses, etc. HMPs frequently co-occur with code-switches and perform a 
function similar to (but different from) that of discourse markers – integrating 
the other-language material.
4.2 Additional Trends in Discourse Analysis
In this section, we discuss selected recent directions in discourse analysis of 
Slavic languages that use interdisciplinary methodologies to further the field 
of Slavic linguistics, as well as provide theoretical and empirical contributions 
to the field of linguistics as a whole.
Bilingualism and discourse analysis. A number of recent studies address 
discourse analysis in bilingual and multilingual situations, an important area 
of study which should benefit from further exploration of migrant and refugee 
contexts. Notable studies include Ries (2013), who shows how code-switching in 
bilingual families of Russian Germans who immigrated from the Soviet Union 
serves discursive purposes; e.g., language choice marks the opening and closing 
of a conversation. Hlavac (2011) discusses bilingualism and hesitation markers.
Deixis. Slavic linguists continue to contribute important studies to the 
intersection of deixis and discourse. Thus, Kresin (1998) analyses the impact 
of deictic reference (esp. the distal demonstrative pronoun tot or ‘that one’) in 
hierarchising Russian narrative discourse. Grenoble and Riley (1996) exam -
ine deixis and discourse coherence using presentative deictics voici/voilà and 
Russian vot/von to organise and mark the progression of discourse; while the 
interlocutors use vot/von to co-construct a frame of reference for the discourse.
Evidentiality, attitudinal and epistemological stance in discourse. Evi-
dential and evaluative markers in discourse have also received attention in 
recent years: thus, Richter (2013) conducted experiments to discuss how speak -
ers express evaluative stance in Russian conversational discourse - especially 
prosodic and rhetorical strategies to express positive or negative attitudes. A 
higher pitch is typical of positive evaluations, a lower pitch of negative evalu -
ations. Kosta (2013) examines the use of lexical items to express evidential 
and/or epistemic meanings, such as the Russian evidential particles vrode and 
vrode by, among others. Perelmutter’s (2009) study of the particle jako in the 
Russian Primary chronicle shows that jako is used as an epistemological marker 
to signal the chronicler’s distancing from the quoted text.
In an important recent article, Garabrandt (2021) investigates the Russian-
language online phenomenon of space omission in phrases such as sama-
vinovata ‘it’ s all your .
FEM
 fault’ in a Russian-language online community for 

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Research Trends in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in the Field of Slavic Linguistics
women. Garabrandt argues that space omission in this community acts as a 
computer-mediated communication cue marking a specific kind of reported 
speech – one that has been heard multiple times by the reporter, and which 
is evaluated negatively. Garabrandt’s research shows that space omission in 
reported speech signals that the originator of the negative speech is positioned 
as an outsider to the group. Given the pervasiveness of space omission as a cue 
in Russian online discourse, more research on space omission in other contexts 
is necessary to reveal how these patterns of usage might generalise, and how 
they might relate to axes of social identity such as gender.
Humour. Various humorous strategies play a prominent role in Slavic dis -
course and pragmatics. Nadine Thielemann has published a number of studies 
focusing on the role of humour in Russian interaction, including a recent post-
doctoral thesis on conversational humour, pragmatics, and cognition (2015) and 
others. Thielemann’s article on arguing by anecdote (2010) looks at how anek-
doty (jocular stories) are incorporated by speakers in mediated contexts (talk 
shows, media interviews, panel discussions, and more) to achieve interactional 
goals. In an excellent study, Thielemann (2013) draws on conversational data 
from ORD, the Russian National Corpus, and her own recordings to research 
Russian humorous strategies (irony, parody, teasing) as a discourse modality. 
Thielemann explores how animated speech is used to ‘stage an utterance’ at -
tributed to a character the speaker animates; through such staged utterances, 
speakers distance themselves from the conveyed discourse and convey a mes -
sage ‘this is play.’
In a recent article, Thielemann (2019) expands her investigations of humour 
in discourse to focus on allusive talk, or the role of indirect intertextual refer -
ences in Russian conversations. Intertextual references are commonplace in 
Russian conversations but are often difficult to research and even mark, as 
th e y ma y n o t be e xp li c i tl y mark ed as all us i o ns o r c i ta ti o ns fro m te xts . Th e 
presence of such allusions marks ‘a shared repertoire of culturally grounded 
texts is exploited to generate an additional layer of meanings’ (Thielemann 
2019:124). When speakers understand and react (e.g., playfully, with laughter) 
to such indirect allusions, this reinforces common ground and serves as an 
in-grouping strategy.
Parentheticals. Grenoble (2004)’s study of Russian parentheticals uses rel -
evance theory to separate parentheticals into procedural and conceptual paren -
theticals: ‘The procedural parentheticals include parenthetical verbs, sentential 
adverbials and adverbial discourse connectives, while conceptual parentheticals 
include parenthetical clauses of an open-ended class of possibilities.’
New methodologies. An impo rtan t recen t de v e l opm en t wi thin disco urse 
analysis relates to the development of mixed-methods and quantitative method -
ologies to analyse discourse. An interesting example is an article by Sherstinova 
(2013), who uses the ORD Speech Corpus of Russian Everyday Communica -
tion to statistically model the most frequent utterances in spontaneous Russian 
discourse. She compiles a list of most frequent Russian utterances between 1-4 

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words long; discourse particles frequently appear in the list of most common 
Russian utterances. Stepanova (2013) uses the ORD Speech Corpus of Russian 
Everyday Communication to analyse speech rate production in Russian dis -
course, with special attention to demographic features. Speech rate correlates 
with speakers’ linguistic competence (the higher-competent speakers speak 
slower), and with such identity-salient factors as sex and age. Unexpectedly, 
she reveals that Russian women speak more slowly than Russian men.
Turn-Taking. Turn-taking is of perennial interest to scholars of discourse 
analysis, and Slavic linguists have done recent work on this important topic. In 
the notable article ‘Talking out of turn: (Co)-constructing Russian conversation,’ 
Grenoble (2013) shows how Russian-speaking migrants recorded in Brooklyn, 
New York, collaborate in interaction by anticipating and sharing syntax: one 
speaker begins a syntactic construction, and another speaker completes it, cre -
ating ‘co-constructions’ of various types of which most basic are completions 
(one speaker begins a syntactic construction, the other completes the turn) and 
extensions (one speaker completes a syntactic unit, the other creates a longer 
syntactic unit by adding or extending the first).
Professional discourse. S tudi es tha t e xamin e pro f ess i o nal disco urse an d 
modes of communication apply pragmatic theory and methods to analyses of 
written communication. Often, they offer a cross-linguistic comparison between 
Slavic and non-Slavic languages (most commonly English), expanding the 
growing body of scholarship in cross-cultural pragmatics (Wierzbicka 1985, 
1993). In this vein, Duszak (1994) provides an account of (in)directness strate -
gies used by English- and Polish-language authors in academic discourse. The 
author concludes that while directness and assertiveness figure prominently in 
English materials, Polish authors tend to offer accounts that are more hedged, 
tentative, and indirect. Blagojević and Mišić Ilić (2012) further develop this 
line of research by looking at the use of interrogatives in English- and Serbian-
language academic works. Their analysis finds that compared to their English 
counterparts, Serbian scholars employ more interrogative forms, even if they 
write in English. A comparative angle is also employed by Mišić Ilić (2017) 
who provides an overview and typology of pragmatic borrowings from English 
into Serbian.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA). Concerned wi th cri ti cal anal yses o f 
language-based constructions of political and social knowledge (Hart 2011), 
the field of critical discourse studies (CDS) has been attracting an increasing 
number of researchers working with Slavic languages. This trend is especially 
evident within the last decade or so as the ideas of globalisation and multi -
culturalism (and migration in particular) have trickled into mainstream public 
discourse. As political actors and laypersons started producing discourse that 
engages with those discussions, scholars have turned their attention to the 
media and mediatised representations of those narratives (e.g., Chovanec and 
Molek-Kozakowska 2017). Despite the growing interest in (critical) discourse 
studies, such publications are; however, mostly limited to West Slavic data. 

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For instance, Chovanec (2017) examines exclusionary and othering scripts 
about the Roma by looking at British and Czech online discussion forums. 
The author shows how linguistic strategies of delocalisation delegitimise the 
Roma’s right to reside in either of the countries, effectively rendering the com -
munity both spatially and temporarily distant. Grzymała-Kazłowska (2007, 
2009) studies discourses about immigrants in the Polish press at the turn of the 
century and finds that representations of newcomers to Poland have become 
increasingly crystallised and polarised, ranging from multicultural to ethno-
nationalistic discourses. Similarly, Krzyżanowski (2018) demonstrates how 
the post-2015 discursive shift in political discourse in Poland, enabled by the 
instalment of the right-wing Law and Justice government, has produced strong 
anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric. Continuing this thread, Cap (2018) 
applies his proximisation theory (Cap 2013) to political discourse in order to 
explore the role of deixis in the processes of legitimisation and persuasion. 
The author concludes that the discursive narrowing of the distance between 
residents of Poland and potential newcomers to the country represents a key 
factor in the Polish government’s successful management of the so-called 
refugee/immigration crisis.
In notable East Slavic examples, Nedashkivska (2009) takes a gender-
linguistic approach to Ukrainian-language discussions and finds that females 
and males present themselves differently on the Internet. The author finds 
that these differences are more cognitive than linguistic in nature. Thus, fe -
males operate more ‘locally’ and orient themselves to the addressee first (e.g., 
šanovnyj ‘dear.M.FORMAL ’+first+last name, Nedashkivska 2009: 225) while 
males use language implying indirectness and a more generalised addressee 
base (e.g., through frequent use of treba/potribno/neobxidno ‘it is necessary’ , 
Nedashkivska 2009: 228). In another study, Kiss (2021) analyses the role of 
bloggers as social actors in contemporary language policy debates in Ukraine. 
Drawing on her textual and multimedia analysis, the author identifies four 
major conceptualisations of language as revealed in the blog corpus. The two 
most common conceptualisations are based on the ideas that ‘language unites’ 
and ‘language constitutes identity,’ followed by the concepts of language as 
something that requires support and language as a weapon.
The 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation has also been 
the focus of several CDA- and CDS-oriented studies, including the 2020 edited 
volume Language of Conflict: Discourses of the Ukrainian Crisis. In one of 
the chapters in the volume, Karpenko-Seccombe (2020) examines Ukrainian 
and Russian parliamentary debates on the annexation. Using data from two 
corpora, one Ukrainian and one Russian, the author identifies quantitative 
and qualitative differences in the frequency of war-related keywords in each 
corpus (35% in the former versus 14.5% in the latter). Karpenko-Seccombe’s 
study demonstrates that the same event was discussed and portrayed rather 
differently in the two countries and that aggression-related themes were much 
more prevalent on the Ukrainian side.

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Renee Perelmutter, Krzysztof E. Borowski
Arcimavičienė (2020) uses critical metaphor theories to study metaphorical 
representations of the Crimea crisis in speeches of Ukrainian (Petro Porosh -
enko) and Russian (Vladimir Putin) presidents. The author finds that each 
politician deploys different metaphors to explain their view of the 2014 events. 
For Poroshenko, value and moral systems represent a central and most com -
monly used discursive category. In that view, Ukraine is often personified as a 
rational and moral actor engaged in an unjust war with its aggressive neighbour, 
Russia. Unlike Poroshenko, Putin mobilises metaphors of physical space and 
motion to present Russia as a victim of external forces, defending itself against 
what is portrayed as Western expansionism. In a similar study, Baysha (2020) 
uses qualitative discourse analysis to investigate the usage of demeaning terms 
(‘memes’) in Facebook debates of Ukrainian citizens who hold pro-Maidan 
and anti-Maidan positions. Applying Carpentier’s framework of antagonistic 
discourse, the author shows how terms such as kolorad ‘Colorado bug’, vatnik 
(‘cotton-head’), skakun ‘jumper’, kastrjulegolovi (Ukrainian)/kastrjulegolovyje 
(Russian) ‘panhead’, and others are used to create homogenisation of the self 
and dehumanisation of the other, construct the existence of a radical difference 
between self and other where the self is inferior, and finally, use the radical 
othering of the opponent to call for the destruction of the enemy.
Weiss (2020) critically analyses family-related metaphors referring to 
Ukraine in discourses surrounding the 2014 crisis. The results show a number 
of diminutivising and infantilising metaphors used in reference to Ukraine 
as a nation and state. For instance, Ukraine tends to be portrayed as Russia’s 
younger sister or, worse yet, as a ‘stillborn child’ born in 1991. In one extended 
metaphor voiced in a political TV talk show, the existence of an independent 
Ukrainian state is openly questioned and infantilised, suggesting that only 
Russia’s sovereignty over Ukraine will help the country prosper:
(6)
Украина – это по сути искуственно созданное государство […] этот 
зародыш, эмбрион развивался в Советской империи, в 91-м родилось на свет 
мёртворождённое дитя. […] Но тем не менее на Украине родился один крепкий, 
здоровый ребёнок. И имя ему: Новороссия. У него: русская мать, русский отец 
и непременно счастливое русское будущее.
‘Ukraine is actually an artificially created state […] This foetus, or embryo developed 
in the Soviet empire. In 1991, the stillborn child entered the world. […] Nevertheless, a 
healthy and strong baby was born in Ukraine. Its name is Novorossija. It has a Russian 
mother, a Russian father and no doubt a happy Russian future.’ G. Kornilov, source: A. 
Gordon i G. Kornilov, Politika s Petrom Tolstym, 9 April 2015 (Weiss 2020: 224–225).
A notable contribution to the volume is provided by Nedashkivska (2020), who 
conducted an analysis of discursive practices on Ukrainian social media (such 
as Facebook) and online media sites to examine how discursive practices con -
tribute to the production and circulation of language ideologies in Ukraine after 
2012. Searching Facebook for keywords which relate to language, bilingualism, 

—  67  —
Research Trends in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis in the Field of Slavic Linguistics
and language ideologies in both Ukrainian and Russian, Nedashkivska utilised 
the snowball method to construct a corpus of 18 social media pages and 8 social 
media sites. The research revealed a plurality of language ideologies, includ -
ing discourses related to language choice (between Ukrainian and Russian); 
Ukrainian language activism as it relates to national identity; bilingualism; and 
the ideology of plurilingualism and internal diversity. Nedashkivska’s analysis 
and documentation of discursive practices that contribute to the construction of 
coexisting and often competing language ideologies is going to be fundamental 
to future research on the shifts in language ideologies occurring in Ukraine 
after the Russian Federation’s invasion in early 2022.
5 Conclusions
Recent years have seen an explosion of notable studies examining Slavic data to 
theorise new directions in the scholarship of pragmatics and discourse; Slavists 
appear with increasing frequency amidst the pages of the Journal of Pragmat-
ics and other leading journals in the field. Important work remains to be done 
in multiple areas of pragmatics and discourse analysis. Thus, the interplay of 
institutional contexts, facework, and power has only recently begun to receive 
the attention of pragmatics theorists. The importance of institutional contexts 
in Slavic lands, and the rich experience of changing institutional discourses 
(e.g., pre- and post- the Soviet period) would benefit from multiple empirical 
investigations which have the potential of contributing both theory and data to 
this important direction in pragmatics.
Mediated environments, especially online environments in all their diversity, 
present an intriguing avenue for the study of facework, emotions, discourse 
particles, and a plethora of other topics connected to discourse and pragmatics 
in the context of multi-participant discourse which is rich in textual cues. The 
trends of online othering, radicalisation, and hate speech benefit from theoreti -
cally informed pragmatics investigations (Perelmutter 2013). The intersection 
between specific linguistic means (such as discourse markers) and their func -
tions in discourse remains fruitful for Slavists, as is the interaction between 
pragmatics and morphosyntax (cf. Zeldovich’s detailed study of the intersection 
of pragmatics and grammar, including aspect, case, and adjectival form).
Of special interest to Slavists is the intersection of L2 learning (specifically 
as it relates to Russian instruction) and pragmatics. A number of recent disserta -
tions and articles address various aspects of Russian pragmatics acquisition in 
L2 learners (Moskala-Gallaher 2011; Tsylina 2016; Shardakova 2005; Gallaher 
2014; Shleykina 2016, and others); however, there is room for more detailed 
studies as well as systematic theorising of pragmatics of L2 acquisition of Slavic 
languages. In addition, moving away from a Russian focus and researching L2 
acquisition of other Slavic languages should yield important insights. A wel -
come addition to the field is the work of Sivachenko (2020), whose dissertation 

—  68  — Slavia Centralis 2/2022
Renee Perelmutter, Krzysztof E. Borowski
investigated the pragmatic behaviour of first-language Ukrainian speakers and 
the acquisition of these strategies – such as direct, conventionally indirect, and 
indirect requests – by L2 learners of Ukrainian.
Finally, issues of bilingual and multilingual discourse and pragmatics de -
serve further attention. Ries (2013) and Hlavac (2011) discuss code-switching 
and discourse; and a recent article by Perelmutter (2018) shows the impact of 
globalisation and migration in multilingual (im)politeness and facework of 
Jewish-Russian migrants to Israel. This promising and important field of study 
would benefit from further contributions from Slavists.
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RAZISKOV ALNI TRENDI V PRAGMATIKI IN ANALIZI DISKURZA NA 
PODROČJU SLOVANSKEGA JEZIKOSLOVJA
V članku je narejen pregled najnovejših trendov v pragmatiki in diskurznem raziskova -
nju slovanskih jezikov. Pregled začenjamo s pozivom Lenore Grenoble iz leta 2006 za 
povečanje slovanskih raziskav na podpodročjih analize diskurza in pragmatike. V letih, 
ki so sledila, so se pojavila številna dela, ki se ukvarjajo s temi področji, kar je vodilo 
v pojav znanstvenih razprav o tematikah, kot so (ne)vljudnost, ohranjanje dostojanstva, 
govorna dejanja in označevalci diskurza. Slednji so bili deležni velike pozornosti sla -
vistk in slavistov vseh treh slovanskih jezikovnih vej. Po kratki metodološki razpravi 
preučujemo nekaj najpomembnejših trendov v pragmatiki. Pregledujemo nedavna razi -
skovanja na področju študij ohranjanja dostojanstva in (ne)vljudnosti (kot tudi njunega 
presečišča z institucionalno močjo), nevljudnosti in sovražnega govora, (ne)vljudnosti in 
govornih dejanj ter pragmatike čustev. Pragmatični pojavi, obravnavani v tem razdelku, 
vključujejo (govorna) dejanja, ki ogrožajo naše dostojanstvo, dajanje nasvetov, norme 
(ne)vljudnosti v spletnih in nespletnih kontekstih, pragmatične vidike institucionalnih 
diskurzov, moč v interakcijah med zdravnikom in pacientom, sovražne diskurze, nastale 

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kot odgovor na politično dogajanje, in opravičilo. V naslednjem razdelku se osredo -
točamo na raziskave na področju analize diskurza. Razdelek začenjamo s pregledom 
novejših raziskav slovanskih diskurznih označevalcev. Nato povzemamo izbrana dela, 
ki se ukvarjajo s tematikami, kot so dvojezičnost, deikse, evidentnost in drža, humor, 
izmenjava govornih vlog, strokovni diskurz in vedno bolj priljubljeno področje kritične 
analize diskurza, ki temelji na slovanskih podatkih. Članek zaključujemo s predlogi 
za prihodnje raziskovanje presečišča ohranjanja dostojanstva, moči in institucionalnih 
kontekstov, oblike in funkcije v diskurzu, morfosintakse in pragmatike, pragmatike in 
usvajanja drugega jezika ter pragmatike v dvo- in večjezičnem diskurzu.