Forecasting in speech activity

Absolutely all kinds of human and animal activities include a component of forecasting, otherwise called “anticipation” or “anticipation”. Scientists have discovered that any act of activity consists of “moments of waiting for something that is likely in a given situation” and following actions by an active individual that, if it wants to survive, there must be something that is always called “on the alert” : instinct and experience tells her to avoid a possible danger, you need to have time to grab the food, etc. And all this

perhaps, being in a state of constant readiness for some expedient actions: the nimble fish is therefore in constant motion; in a waking state, a wolf or a bird, a cheetah or a snake is always “mobilized” ... And how is a person who is conscious and builds life in a different way in this sense?

It turns out that man in this sense is not so different from his "smaller brothers". Moreover, the tougher and more consciously a person plans his day or his weeks - months - years, the more he becomes dependent on things he has planned, not wanting to depend on all sorts of accidents (like animals). When we used the word “wants” a little higher in connection with the behavior of the animal, we, of course, did not mean that the animal “wants” as we want. The rough saying “If you want to live - know how to spin” makes you recall, of course, the mentioned brisk fish. But if you say “If you want to live as it should be for a man, know how to anticipate, plan and act,” then everything is correct. But what does "anticipate" mean?

Here we mean a lot and different. Part of what we anticipate, even without noticing it, does not depend on us: the change of seasons and days (in general, everything that is called “time running”), our current position in society, the state of our body, the schedule of vehicles and etc. and other phenomena that make up the "order of the circumstances" of our lives. This also includes norms of social behavior (the whole system of prohibitions and permits dictated to us by society), generally accepted traditions and rules of etiquette. All of this in combination forces us to be attentive (“mobilized”), now and then to look at the calendar and at the clock, at schedules of all kinds, look in the notebook (so as not to miss urgent matters), speed up the step or even run or, on the contrary, allow yourself to relax and rest from the execution of cases, before starting to do things that have not yet been completed and are waiting for us soon. We run to the bus stop, hoping (that is, predicting) to have time for the deadline where we need to go. Having found many people at a bus stop, we can decide not to wait, but to go in the right direction with a quick step (expecting, that is, predicting success). But note that the change of decisions and the corresponding actions occurred at the very moment when, after assessing the situation, we were convinced that our former project

the gnosis (it is still customary to say “our former hypothesis”) was not confirmed. We hope that the concept of "predicting behavior" has become clearer. As it became clear that animals cannot, like us, consciously analyze circumstances and make "human decisions." But if instinct and experience suggest that a pack of wolves pursuing a deer, it is more expedient for a part of the pack to chase a deer from behind, and another part - to “rush to intercept”, then you will agree, this means making the right decision and anticipating the future direction of running a deer: wolves do it, of course, not knowing that the length of the hypotenuse is less than the sum of the lengths of the two legs ... But the successful result of hunting with this division of the pack is much more likely - we know this from our own (though far from the wolfish) experience and knowledge of geometry.

From the earliest school years, we are familiar with the exercise with the instruction “Complete the sentences, putting words that are meaningful instead of points”. For example, the beginning of the proposals is given a ) "Seeing the glittering expanse of the river in the gaps of pines, the guys immediately ..." b) "My throat suddenly got sore and I decided immediately ...". The pupils, without particularly difficulty, perform tasks with such options, for example: For a) “... run to the water, shouting merrily”; "... rushed to the shore, taking off their shirts on the move . " For b) "... see a doctor"; "... that I will not go to school"; "... go and rinse with medicine . " It is not excluded that it was precisely such options for the completion of sentences that the compilers of the exercise had in mind: in such descriptions of situations, it is precisely such a development of events and precisely this language form of their descriptions. Agree that far less likely to continue the type of "wept like beluga" (for a)) or "write a long essay" (for b)).

Thus, we are closer to the conclusion that the concepts of “forecast”, “anticipation”, “hypothesis” (mental instantaneous hypothesizing) are associated with the concept of “probability of an event”. But the latter is connected with language, with speech. And you can talk about "linguistic probability" (better: "linguistic probability") and about "speech probability". We explain this with a variety of examples.

The compilers of special dictionaries of different languages ​​- frequency dictionaries - pursue different goals, but one of them remains always the same: you need to find out which lexical units of a given language are found in texts in this language

often, which - rarely, which occupy various intermediate positions. The entire frequency dictionary can be imagined as a pyramid, on top of which are located the few most common units, at the wide base of the pyramid - most of them are relatively rare. This “frequency pyramid” clearly shows that at the top there are prepositions (for foreign languages ​​of a known type, there are articles here), alliances, the most semantically widespread verbs like “do”, the noun “time”, the negations of “no” and “not” , the affirmative word “yes”, etc. It is intuitively clear that the verbs, say “revise” or “ping” are closer to the base than, for example, the verb “is” or “buy”. And adverbs “quickly” or “slowly” will be closer to the top than adverbs “scrupulously” or “vulgar”. Because of the phrase “I wrote quickly” or “read slowly”, it is more probable in speech (in oral or written) than “I read vulgarly” or “I wrote it scrupulously.” And this, in turn, means that, reading a book or hearing the interlocutor's oral speech, people unwittingly predict (and sometimes even mistakenly “hear” or “see”) what is most probabilistic (for most often occurs) for speech (text ).

V.V. Mayakovsky wrote that when he walked down the street one day, he stopped as if rooted to the spot, because it seemed to him that on the sign he saw: “Fairy tale materials”. Peered: "Lubricants." Why an error occurred? After all, “lubricants” are usually, and “fabulous” ones are incredible to see on the store's signboard! Maybe the thoughts of the poet at that moment were busy writing a poem "The Tale of the Little Red Riding Hood" or "The Tale and Pete, a fat child ..." or "The Tale of the deserter ..". In such cases, scientists say, the cause of the error could be a “set” on the perception of certain words. On the psychological phenomenon of "installation" we will talk later. It is important to note now: the sudden stop of Mayakovsky on the street and the attention to the signboard are caused precisely by the fact that the phrase “fabulous materials” is almost unbelievable in this situation: even though I “saw”, you need to check!

Special experiments show that a significant part of what we hear is determined just by our experience of forecasting in speech. The experimenter listens to a tape recording of a certain dialogue, asking the subject to record

vat heard in pencil. Pencil entry is obtained as follows:

- Hello, old man! How many winters, how many years have you not seen!

- Hello my friend! I am very glad to see you! - Well, tell me how are you?

- Yes, in general, you know, I'm not complaining. Everything is fine with me.

A tape recorder (specially) recorded something else:

- Hello wig ! How many winters, how many met you did not see!

- Hello my friend! Very glad to hurt you !

- Well, take away how are I doing?

Yes, in general, with our not complaining. Everything in you is normal.

It is clear that the tape recording is given in the usual interactive patter, and not deliberately separately and clearly. But why did the listener and writer miss so many mistakes? Yes, only because his own communicative experience allows him to always listen to the ritual part of the dialogue without special attention - in the usual verbal ritual of the meeting there is almost no important information. Therefore, you “hear” what you anticipate, what “should be,” and not what it really is. It turns out that the American communications specialist, James Flanagan, was right when he wrote: “It should be considered proven that a person listening or reading a certain text perceives it not strictly linearly (word by word), but by larger contextual blocks, decoding the text in connection with the situation and the likelihood that certain components of particular elements appear in it ”.

The genre nature of human speech thinking plays a huge role in such pre-emptive perception. What speech genre the speech addressee is set for largely determines the direction and character of decoding the meaning of a statement: in a heart-to-heart confessional conversation, we otherwise perceive the speech addressed to us than in superficial chatter or small talk.

It can be shown in simple experience what “language probability” is at the level of linear perception of a word or phrase. Assume that it is proposed to continue the letter following the written "M". The subjects propose: “Mi” (predicting the name of the note or the word “minute.” But the experimenter rejects “and,” saying that the next letter is “o.” The subjects offer a continuation: “g” (from the verb “can”), “p "(Having in

mind "mor" or "frost"). And so on and so forth. What do the subjects offer? The most likely letters in the most likely words. Why (in another experiment), the subjects become stumped when the experimenter says that “M” should follow “k”? Yes, because the phrase MK in the Russian word is found either in an abbreviated word, or at the junction of different words (for example, “In that Land”). The Armenian surname Mkrtchan was conceived - to show the specifics of the sound (and letter) combination of possibilities in different languages. We can say here: the surname was not uttered by the subjects, because they did not have a “mindset” to predict non-Russian words in general.

The second example concerns the prediction of grammatical features of words in their linear representation. If, say, the first word “lonely” is given, then there must be either “life” or “pine”, or “woman”, or something else, but almost certainly - a feminine noun. Similarly, after “some” one should predict the appearance of “time” or “thinking”, but the noun here is very probable, with the masculine or neuter and genitive case of the singular.

From here we must draw at least the conclusions that listening or reading, we predict (and therefore expect, hypothesize), firstly, an event “behind the text” (text content), secondly, a specific vocabulary as a means of describing this event; thirdly, grammatical forms of lexical units and integral structures. The latter is confirmed by the fact that, for example, the initial word “why”, “why”, “from”, “which” and others prompts us to assume that the whole sentence will be interrogative, which is very likely.

Now more about the installation phenomenon, which is best studied by the head of the Georgian psychological school, academician Dmitry Nikolaevich Uznadze. The term “installation” is usually called a special state of mind with the function of “being prepared for perception of a certain object (phenomenon) or its quality based on previous experience of its perception” or based on the type of perception of a given object brought up (in the course of learning through oral or written texts) . The specificity of the installation consists, firstly, in the fact that it forms

subconsciously, that is, without explicit control of consciousness, without analysis, and can be extremely persistent, turn into a habit, into a prejudice. A simple example is our attitude towards the snake, which is absent in, say, a number of tropical countries, where children play with young boas as with domestic animals. Well-known, unfortunately, nationalistic prejudices, which are extremely difficult to overcome, are an installation nature phenomenon. Atheistic education creates one installation, religious - just the opposite. And both installations do not need argumentation, based on experience. For example, by virtue of his attitude, an atheist will never believe a believer that he “knew God”, that he was “the manifestation of the Holy Spirit”. Another example is that a sociable extrovert is always ready to communicate with a stranger to him, in which his antipode, an introvert, shies away from a frank conversation, even with a well-known person.

In the classical experiment of D. N. Uznadze, the subject was put hands in back of the ball several times with balls of the same size but different weight: in the right hand, say, heavier than in the left, and this fact was evaluated by the subject, which was fixed. The experiment was repeated 5-6 times, after which the difference in the weight of the balls diminished (the subject continued to feel it), and finally the heavier ball began to be inserted into the left hand, but the test subject's report continued to remain unchanged: “deception of feelings” due to a pre-formed setup , was stronger than the actual experience of the test. Finally, the actual experience won, and the subject began to give correct answers about the facts. In such cases, psychologists state the “crisis of the former installation.” Numerous experiments on a huge number of subjects show that at the level of sensations (gravity, for example), installations are quickly created, but their crisis may also come soon. However, with the global attitudes of the worldview, prejudicial installation order, quickly formed, may no longer experience any crisis until the end of human life. The same can be said about the attitudes of the personality-characterological, natural type: a genuine optimist remains as true a pessimist, for a long time or forever.

The second characteristic feature of attitudinal behavior relates to specific human actions that disintegrate.

on a number of interrelated operations - whether it is a way of lacing shoes, brushing your teeth or sticking an envelope with letters. Not only the general installation for the final result acts here, but also individual operating units inside the common one: try to come up with some kind of modified operation for yourself when performing a routine action or insert some new operation into a familiar row (say, a mandatory finger touching the ear before starting brushing teeth) - it can happen once, but will disappear in the future.

Everyone who has learned a new language knows: in the early stages of learning, even the letters of a new language want to be read (and read!) Not in the way it should, but in accordance with the consistent installation of the native language. And in the future, even with successful learning of a new language, this installation rarely disappears forever, manifesting itself in various errors like Russian-speaking structure - in the skips of the article (which is not in Russian), in word order violations (it is relatively free in Russian), in lexical combinations, etc. And why children - the younger, the more successful - learn a second language, especially in a new foreign language environment? Yes, because the initial installation in their native language has not yet become solid and can survive the crisis in just a few months. And why are cases of preservation of the first and effective knowledge of a second language in children? Because only (and there are no other conditions), the child continues to communicate “with the first installation” with one parent, and “with the second” in other cases. If such a child is not yet 4-5 years old, he himself does not notice that he speaks different languages ​​with different people. In our observations, there were two such children who once shared with their multilingual parents the news that struck them: “And Bertha and Dad and Mom speak the same way!” The boys were five years old, they live in Germany from the age of two.

The experiment described below was based on the assumption that the explanation of Levin with Kitty in the novel “Anna Karenina” is important not only as a literary, but also as a scientific fact. Recall that in one of the episodes of the novel, Levin and Kitty, not daring to speak out loud with each other after a tiff, write alternately with rows of initial letters in chalk on the green cloth of the gambling table: they encrypt whole sentences in this way. Levin: k, v, m, o, e, n, m, b, z, l, e, n, u, t? Kitty: t, i, n, m, o, and.

Tolstoy writes: "there was no chance that she could understand this complex phrase." But still - according to the novel - I Kitty and Levin understood each other perfectly. Could this happen?Suppose that in a state of mutual love, young people are set on the same topic of explanation and start from the same episode of the tiffs in the past, that is, they have a strong overall setting. In the experiment, of course, you will not create such an installation. But, maybe, it is possible to create at least an unstable (temporary) installation in connection with common interests? A large group of students were read interesting information about the behavior of dolphins and whales, about their intellectual abilities. Then this information was lively discussed for 15-20 minutes. Such conversations took place over the next four days — students' essays on relevant popular science literature were discussed; on the fifth day, the experimenter, concluding the topic, offered to “distract”, distributed cards with rows of initial letters of encrypted words of sentences.The task for students is to decipher messages as quickly as possible. The results of the experiment were as follows:

It is also significant that the last two ciphers meant simple questions, but the subjects interpreted them according to the created preliminary installation: "Whales too ...", "Whales or dolphins ..."

Only 9 out of 40 students did not form the conceived attitude, and 10 more could not, although they "thought about dolphins", to give coherent transcripts. This means that conditions can be created that are somewhat analogous to L. Tolstoy's episode.

But even without special experiments, everyone knows the "phenomenon of understanding at a glance": it manifests itself when the participants in the dialogue know each other well (both the points of view and the topic of the conversation are well known) or when the speaker "gives out clichés" says banalities. If someone, say, moralizing begins: "Life is a thing, you know ...", then the listener himself can complete the phrase: "... the thing is not easy" or "... you don't play naughty." Many dashing detectives (films or prose) are constructed so primitively that the development of the plot is easily anticipated. Only a skillful plot can create the “effect of disappointed expectations”: the reader anticipated the immediate capture and punishment of the offender, and he suddenly outwitted everyone and disappeared ...

Let us once again emphasize the influence of a communication situation on the formation of an attitude in speech communication. Typical situations of interaction between people, repeating from day to day, are molded in our minds into typical communication scenarios, called speech genres. By entering into communication, we adjust ourselves to a certain stereotype of perception: the perception of a scientific report and, for example, gossip about a movie star, is built in different ways.

We have already paid attention to the role of the names of literary works in the organization of their perception. Some of them are more or less detailed and help to build reliable hypotheses from the text. For example, "About how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich." Or: "A deputy, or the story of how Desderonov lost 25 rubles" (comic story by AP Chekhov). But there are also headings that are called "poorly orienting" (as opposed to "orienting"). For example, the title of Chekhov's story "The Steppe" tells the reader almost nothing in advance. There are also names that are “disorienting”: “Intruder” (after reading it, the reader of Chekhov can put forward a hypothesis that it will be told about an inveterate criminal, and not about a darkish peasant unscrewing nuts from rails onto sinkers), “Surgery”, “Kings and cabbage "(the American writer O. Henry specially invented this name for a collection of stories - according to the principle:" Because there are no kings or cabbage in any of the stories ").

So far, we have talked about prediction in reception (speech perception). And is the speaker's own speech (writing) predicted? NI Zhinkin, already familiar to us, believed that “without predicting one's own speech - according to its main content - there is no coherent and meaningful statement

it can not be". But, deeply respecting the scientist, let's still turn to experience, to our own observations.

It is well known that it is with great difficulty that junior schoolchildren master the art of drawing up a plan for presenting what they have heard or read. Often, older children and adults alike experience such difficulties. It turns out this way because without the habit of preliminary thinking (and the habit should be formed by exercises, own experience), the general plan of the statement is planned for a very small "depth distance": roughly speaking - "I will start writing (speaking) from the first words I come across, and then - we'll see how it goes". For example, here is a letter from a first grader: “Dear grandmother and grandfather! I live normally. I study normally. I drew a cat Timka. There is nothing more to write. Vitya ".

One can easily imagine that Vitya managed to write this letter with difficulty and that the beginning of the letter and other "topics" were suggested to him by his father and mother. And that the joy at the completion of the unusual business was undeniable ... But how do adult specialists - politicians, publicists, scientists, writers write? Most of them have a well-developed ability to draw up a detailed plan for a future article, speech or report. Then the plan turns into a synopsis, overgrown with details and details. Then the final text is drawn up. But, for example, it is well known with what number of draft versions L.N. Tolstoy wrote his creations, who even continued to make changes and additions to the typographic proofs. And here is what A. Pushkin wrote about his creative process in Autumn (1833):

The soul is embarrassed by lyrical excitement

Trembles and sounds, and seeks, as in a dream,

To pour out, finally, free manifestation -

And then an invisible swarm of guests comes to me,

Old acquaintances, the fruits of my dreams.

And the thoughts in my head are agitated in courage

And light rhymes run towards them,

And fingers ask for a pen, a pen for paper,

A minute - and poetry will flow freely.

Many people remember here only the last line, which they then willingly quote - that's how easily Pushkin wrote.

But the rough sketches and countless alterations in the manuscripts of the genius poet, and the text of "Autumn" itself, testify to something else. A swarm surging in a moment of lyrical excitement thoughts and images are after all “old acquaintances” (he had long been thinking about future stanzas), words are groaning “like in a dream”, indistinct, and “minute” is the final moment of creativity. In accordance with our theme, we must interpret what Pushkin said as a long and painful process of transition from a diffuse, originally meaning-figurative program to a specific verbal implementation. And the great poet A. Fet also well depicted this process, starting with anticipating future lines:

Tell that from everywhere

I am amused by fun

What I do not know myself that I will

To sing - but only the song ripens.

Here is another testimony of V. Mayakovsky about his creative work (this is an excerpt from the article “How to make poems”): “I walk, waving my arms and mumbling ..., then shorten the step so as not to interfere with the lowing, then I moisten faster in time with the steps. So the rhythm is cut and formed - the basis of every poetic thing passing through it with a buzz. Gradually, you begin to pull out separate words from this buzz. The first most often revealed main word is the main word characterizing the meaning of the verse ... The remaining words come and are inserted depending on the main one. ”

One should not think that “the main word is necessarily one of the main members of the sentence (subject or predicate). Just the example of V. Mayakovsky (in the same article) concerns the figurative phrase “the only leg” (direct addition), which was written by the poet in a hurry at night by a burnt match. It was the “main image” in the stanza: “I will take care of and love your body, / As a soldier, cut off by the war / Unnecessary, nobody, protects his only leg”.

The reader is invited, in conclusion, to compare the statement of Mayakovsky and the poems of Pushkin, cited above, with the poem by Anna Akhmatova:

It happens like this: some languor;

The battle of the clock does not stop in the ears;

In the distance, the rumbling of the subsiding thunder,

Unrecognized and captured voices

I see complaints and groans,

Some secret circle is narrowing

But in this abyss of whispers and chimes

One gets up, all winning sound.

So round him irreparably quiet

What can be heard as the grass grows in the forest,

As the earth goes with a knacker famously ...

But now I heard the words

And easy rhyming alarm bells, -

Then I begin to understand

And just dictated lines.

Lie down in the snow-white notebook.