Questioning the purpose of questions: Metacommunicative devices in language (a contrastive study of German and Russian)

The article focuses on linguistic expressions we refer to as metacommunicative. These expressions indicate that the speaker is commenting not on extralinguistic reality but on their own communicative tasks or the communicative goals and skills of their interlocutor. This mode of usage is based on a regular mechanism of shifting the words' scope of reference from the content of the utterance to the communication itself. These metalinguistic usages are akin to metatextual expressions, as well as to illocutionary (rhetorical) units, which, in a way, shape reality rather than describe it. The difference between metatextual and metacommunicative meanings lies in the fact that the former pertain to the utterance itself, while the latter concern the illocutionary goal — not shaping it (as in rhetorical expressions) but commenting on it. The article examines some metacommunicative units in Russian and German. The focus is on the German words warum and wieso in the sense of «why are you asking?' and their Russian equivalent a chto, as well as expressions with broader meanings, such as ty chego?, ty chto, sovsem uzhe?, ty s duba rukhnul?, nu-nu!, da nu tebya!, etc., which can serve as reactions to the interlocutor’s words. The primary research material comes from the German-Russian and Russian-German subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus.