The Use of Pragmatic Markers in the Chinese Play Thunderstorm and Their Translation into Russian

Abstract

Cao Yu’s drama “Thunderstorm” is an outstanding work of great significance in Chinese literature and the history of Chinese theater. Dramatic works extensively feature colloquial vocabulary and traits of oral discourse. In particular, the stylized speech of characters actively employs various pragmatic markers (PMs). Previous research on PMs has mainly focused on their functions in real speech, with dramatic texts receiving little attention. Thus, analyzing dramatic texts and their Russian translations from this perspective represents a relevant and promising direction in colloquial linguistics. This study is based on 119 contexts from the Chinese play Thunderstorm, containing 123 instances of PMs, along with their corresponding translations by V. N. Krivtsov. Methods such as continuous sampling, contextual, comparative, discourse, and quantitative analysis were applied. The results show that Cao Yu uses boundary and metacommunicative markers more frequently, while hesitatives and xenophoric markers occur less often — a distribution that does not match that of natural speech. This suggests a discrepancy between spontaneous and quasi-spontaneous (stylized) speech and challenges equating play dialogue with real communication. Most Chinese PMs were rendered into Russian with their functional status preserved. Some have direct equivalents in Russian, facilitating translation from Chinese, unlike in the reverse direction. This reflects the translator’s effort not only to render words accurately but also to maintain the author’s communicative intentions.