Pragmatics in the digital age: the Routinikon database

This study focuses on the Routinicon database as a digital tool for describing routines — a distinct class of formulaic phraseological units that represent reactions to or comments on standard extralinguistic situations. For instance, the formula Kogo ya vizhu! (Whom do I see!) serves as a reaction to an unexpected meeting, while Kto tam? (Who’s there?) is a standard formulaic reaction to a knock at the door. The collection, classification and study of units of this kind is of undoubted interest both from the point of view of discourse theory and pragmatics, and from the point of view of the practice of mastering live spoken Russian by foreign speakers. Routinicon is a natural extension of the projects Russian Constructicon and Pragmaticon and borrows principles of data collection and data processing from the predecessor projects. At the same time, Routinicon collects phraseological units of a different type than these databases, and their description requires a fundamentally different annotation structure. The article discusses the principles and features of this annotation, as well as its potential for the intralingual classification of Russian language routines and its applicability to the corresponding material of other languages — laying the groundwork for future typological studies. Italian language examples collected by the authors are used for illustrations.