Abstract: The article presents an analysis of fragments of unrealized speech of A.P. Chekhov's heroes in the texts of novels and short stories written in 1888-1904: "Women", "Wife", "Neighbors", "Fear", "Black Monk", "The Story of an unknown person". Typical ways of introducing unrealized speech into the author's context are revealed. In the course of the study, it was found that unrealized speech conveys the innermost thoughts and emotional state of the main characters, being an important factor for understanding the essence of many events that occur in the adult life of A.P. Chekhov's characters. Unrealized speech is a significant component of the text that contributes to the correct interpretation of a particular situation that is associated with the family communication of Chekhov's characters.
Unrealized speech, internal in nature, has an extra-verbal reason why it cannot be expressed verbally. In most cases, such a reason is the emotional state of the character, represented in the Chekhov text by a description of facial expressions or gestures, an out-of-speech situation that does not allow you to express the programmable so as not to offend the other. Analyzing fragments of stories from this period of Chekhov's work, representing family communication, one can come to the conclusion that unrealized speech actualizes the internal speech situation in the texts under study. Typical ways of transmitting unrealized speech are improper-direct, direct or indirect speech, thematic speech in the author's narrative is less common in this function. A typical input for unrealized speech is a modal verb with the meaning of desire or expression of will + an infinitive with the meaning of speech activity in a construction with a contrastive conjunction: I wanted to say, but ...; I wanted to say, but ...; I wanted to answer, but... etc.