Anecdotes-questions: thematic, pragmatic, speech-genre structure

One of the fairly common (more than 300 texts on the «Anekdoty iz Rossii» [Anecdotes from Russia] website (https://www.anekdot.ru) related to this type) structural types of anecdotes is considered - anecdotes-questions (AQ). The study includes content (themes of anecdotes and more particular moments of the semantic structure) and formal (with possible access to the structural type) analysis. Two types of AQ are contrasted in content, the main (genre-forming) of which (AQ<sub>1</sub>) goes back to comic aphorisms-questions. Pragmatically, the interrogative form strengthens the connection with the addressee of the anecdote, thereby additionally drawing attention to the content of the aphorism. The second group of AQ (AQ<sub>2</sub>) is a depiction of a situation of dialogical communication (including Internet communication), where the interrogative remark belongs to one of the characters. In the case of AQ<sub>1</sub>, the focus is on the semantics (the topic) and formal structure of the question itself, including aesthetic aspects, while AQ<sub>2</sub> focuses on the pragmatics of the depicted dialogue situation. Thematically, questions in AQ<sub>1</sub> (anecdotes-sentences) differ from AQ<sub>2</sub> (dialogues): the former usually have a more general, “global” character, while the latter are more often concrete and everyday, tied to current events-names (and in this sense, it seems, infinitely diverse). Pragmatically, a replica-question can quite fully create an image of its author, who can act as a “bearer of folk wisdom” or “logic of idiocy”, contain implicit information about the status, education of its author, as well as a more private life position, for example, political. It is shown that AQ (both AQ<sub>1</sub> and AQ<sub>2</sub>) represent a pragmatic phenomenon that is quite widespread on the Internet, combining features of a monologue and a dialogue.