Building a Database of Conversational Routines

Abstract

This paper discusses the Routinicon, a new constructicographic resource for the description of conversational routines. Conversational routines are defined as conventional formulaic expressions that language speakers use in standard extralinguistic situations (cf. Bless you! as a reaction to sneezing or Who’s there? as a typical answer to a knock on the door). The Routinicon’s goal is to accumulate the routines that constitute the inventory of conventional expressions in Russian language and systematically describe them in a way that would enable future cross-linguistic comparison and typological research. Conceptually, the Routinicon is a natural extension of such projects as the Russian Constructicon and Pragmaticon. It inherits their approach to the systematization of phraseological units as well as to the data collection. At the same time, the new project focuses on a fundamentally different domain of units and hence offers a radically new structure of linguistic annotation. Its principles and challenges are addressed in the paper.