Landlord's Hedged Repair Promise (Russian Listening)
You are taking the DLPT listening section in Russian at ILR 2. The passage is a 90-second phone call between a tenant (female, 30s) and her landlord (male, 50s). It is mid-January in Moscow, –18°C. The tenant says her radiators have been cold for three days and her infant has a fever. The landlord replies: 'Понимаю, понимаю. Заявку я передал, но мастеров сейчас мало - праздники. Обещать не буду, но постараюсь, чтобы до пятницы кто-то зашёл.' The tenant asks, 'То есть до пятницы ждать?' He answers, 'Ну, как получится.' Background noise includes a baby crying. You hear the audio once, then have one replay. You must choose among four options; two options seem plausible if you focus only on the word 'пятницы' (Friday). One question asks what the landlord is actually committing to.
1. What is the landlord actually committing to, and which two linguistic cues in his speech most strongly support your answer?
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He is not committing to a repair by Friday. The two strongest cues are (1) 'Обещать не буду' - an explicit refusal to promise, which overrides the later 'постараюсь' (I'll try); and (2) 'как получится' (we'll see how it turns out), a dismissive idiom that leaves the outcome open. 'Постараюсь, чтобы до пятницы кто-то зашёл' contains a time reference, but the verb is effort-oriented, not result-oriented. A listener who keys on 'до пятницы' alone may wrongly infer a Friday deadline. The correct judgment is that the landlord has passed the request along but guarantees nothing; the tenant's follow-up question ('То есть до пятницы ждать?') is a checksum, and his answer confirms non-commitment.
2. The item's distractors include 'He promises a technician will come before Friday' and 'He refuses to send anyone at all.' Explain why both are wrong.
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The first distractor is wrong because it ignores the explicit negation 'Обещать не буду' and treats 'постараюсь' as a promise. It also overweights the only specific time mentioned. The second distractor is wrong because the landlord does say he submitted the request ('Заявку я передал') and will try to get someone to stop by. The passage is about weak commitment, not outright refusal. DLPT listening items often test this middle ground: the candidate must distinguish a hedged, non-binding assurance from both a firm promise and a flat refusal. The baby crying in the background is a contextual cue that raises the stakes but does not change the landlord's wording.