“Once again I say...”: repetition of what has been said as a means of removing uncertainty

The article analyzes the communicative and cognitive components of a dialogue that induce one of its participants to repeat what has been said and preliminarily reflect this fact in the form of a modus of repeated speaking. The study was carried out on the material of responses of the main corpus of the NCRN to the queries “once again to you”, “once again to you”, “once again to you”, “once again to you”. Except for cases of positive phatic (e.g., “thank you again”), such repetition of information by one of the dialogue participants is due to a communicative failure in the past, for which the speaker attributes responsibility to the interlocutor. The pragmatic prerequisite of such repetition is also the fact that the speaker attributes to himself a status not lower than that of the interlocutor. The cognitive basis of failure in the article is recognised as uncertainty of information, which can be removed or lowered as a result of understated (variant) repetition. It is shown that semantic varieties of uncertainty correlate with the intents of repetitive speech acts. For example, a repeated representative reduces the degree of incompleteness of knowledge or corrects the addressee’s misinterpretation of the information from the speaker’s point of view; a repeated directive and a repeated commission are initiated by an uncertain forecast regarding the further development of events. Repetition can be realised both in the interests of the speaker (imposing his interpretation of the events under discussion) and in the interests of the addressee (clarifying his ideas about the subject of speech). The theoretical significance of the study consists in clarifying the markers of the status positions of the participants of dialogues; the evaluation of the effectiveness of utterances with the explicated modus of repetitive speaking can be used in the practice of teaching communicative disciplines.

modus of repeated speaking, information repetition, communicative failure, uncertainty, intension