TY - JOUR TI - Allusive talk – Playing on indirect intertextual references in Russian conversation AB - In casual conversations, interlocutors often merely hint at intertextual references. The elusive design of such references ranges from extremely truncated or modified quotes, or mentions of names, to the rendition of generic patterns and enregistered (Agha, 2007) varieties associated with social or ethnic stereotypes. The paper refers to such non-explicitly marked references as allusions and discusses the methodological challenges posed by their detection and analysis. Qualitative analyses of four conversational episodes illustrate how Russian speakers and interlocutors draw on such allusions and playfully exploit the meaning potential of the (con-)text referenced. The talk that thereby emerges points, in various ways, to the recognition and possible understanding of an allusion. Allusive talk is thus both based on, and points to, a common ground shared by the interlocutors and providing a rich inferential substrate of interaction (Haugh, 2017) that usually remains unexposed. DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.10.012 SP - 123 EP - 134 UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.10.012 PY - 2020-01-01 JO - Journal of Pragmatics AU - Thielemann, Nadine ER -