Formation of speech utterance

Let us repeat Vygotsky's thought: the origin of speech is always preceded by a motive . This is what we are building our statement for. Sometimes the motive is obvious: we are hungry and ask our grandmother (or mother) to feed us; We do not write a pen at a lecture and we ask a neighbor to borrow a pen or a pencil. However, sometimes the motive is not only not obvious, but also unclear to the author of the speech. Some of our statements (as, indeed, some of our actions), we can not explain to ourselves. We are in a hurry to express our opinion, and then regret our deed; it seems to us that we are cutting the truth-womb, and in actual fact we are trying to show ourselves; we shout out at lectures, trying to clarify the thought of the teacher, and the real motive of our statement is the location of the pretty blonde on the next row, etc., etc.

A woman says a compliment to her friend, and for some reason her mood spoils. A similar situation can be analyzed anecdote.

They talk girlfriend.

- My husband usually smokes only after a good lunch.

- Well, two or three cigarettes a year will not hurt him ...

But even if we are not aware of why we are producing speech, our discourse always has a motive; it becomes a trigger, a push to the beginning of any speech.

In our linguistic consciousness, the motive forms a communicative intention - readiness for speech generation, for communicative actions. At this primary stage of speech formation, a mood is set up for one or another social-communicative situation (chatter or heart-to-heart talk, compliment or quarrel, secular communication or public speaking, etc.), this or that communication modality (conflict, centered, cooperative). ). It is at this stage that the speaker appears - while still vague - a common goal (intention, illocution) of the utterance.

N. I. Zhinkin succeeded (in his brilliant work “Speech Mechanisms”, which was awarded with prizes) with the help of fluoroscopy

To show that the internal organs of the prearti fi cation, which provide speech flow with air flow, and the own (autogenous) oscillations of the vocal cords, these organs become active and occupy a certain position until the moment of pronouncing. Changes that demonstrate the articulation organs of a person who is going to enter into communication are predetermined by the specific situation of verbal interaction.

Let us point out in particular the genre character of this primary stage of human speech thinking. In the second part of our book we will talk about the theory of speech genres, the creator of which was M. M. Bakhtin. The idea of ​​the speech genre - the verbal design of typical situations of social interaction of people - is present in the mind of the speaker in the form of a Ready script (frame), according to which he is ready to build his speech (text). The intonational mood for a particular genre is what N. I. Zhinkin’s experiments show. At the time of the formation of a holistic speech work (discourse), we are already in the primary stages of internal speech, setting ourselves up for a particular communication situation, for a specific speech genre.

Then the formation of the semantic (semantic ) content of the statement begins. There are no elements of the national language yet. In the non-verbal code of images and schemes, which N. I. Zhinkin called the universal subject code (CPC), the general still not quite clear awareness of the general concept of the future discourse is ripening. At this stage of speech generation, the speaker knows what he will say, but does not yet know how. The more complex the informative content of the future utterance (discourse), the less clear is the author of speech, how it will unfold and what external forms it will take.

Only after that the first linguistic components of the future utterance appear in the consciousness. In the internal speech, recoding takes place , meaning is translated (the general idea of ​​the speech whole) from the language of images and schemes into the national language . The initial recording of the content of a speech work still has the character of an extremely concise summary consisting of keywords, nuclear phrases, and rematic sentences fragments. This compressed version of discourse does not yet have grammatical design and carries the personal (understandable only to the speaker himself) meaning.

The further formation of speech has the character of unfolding the nuclear design into a holistic and, if possible, coherent text , text that ideally is constructed in accordance with the psycholinguistic standard of textual character (which we wrote in the previous chapter). It is here that what LS Vygotsky called “the accomplishment of thought in a word” occurs.

We must once again emphasize that any speech statement, be it a sentence or a text, is precisely formed, generated, and not transferred “in finished form” from thought to speech. A simple observation proves it: the speaker permits pauses (even if he doesn’t stumble often, if his speech is quite “smooth”), longer than usual (breathing). These pauses can be filled with all sorts of "uh ..." or "mmm ..." or parasitic inclusions like, "Do you understand," "so to speak," "means," "behold," "this is the most" , “Such a thing” and so on and so forth. It is customary to call such unfilled or filled pauses “chezitations” (translated into Russian - “vibrations”), indicating that the speaker may not immediately find a suitable word for expressing your thoughts or feelings. The same corrections are indicated by autocorrections, which sometimes have the form of not only corrections of what was already said, but also more detailed explanations: “No, I'm sorry, I wanted to say not exactly that”.

It is easy to find that syntactic unity is primarily undergoing restructuring: “Why did you have me ... Could you not ask me?” Or: “Let's better ... you know when?” I want to say that tomorrow I’m busy, ”and others. All of this, in particular, means that the future design is in speech, i.e., the meaning that is constructed in the speaker’s brain apparatus is not necessarily even at the moment of actual verbalization -“ originally tied to a specific form of language expression.

Experiments neurolinguist A. R. Luria confirmed the idea of ​​Fr. syntax primacy in the process of forming an utterance. Suffering from aphasia often helps to express the presence of external supports (cubes or paper squares), as if “bringing out” the structure of a future phrase; three dice - three words, two dice - two words. For example, when aphasic cannot answer the simple question “What is your name?”, He is alternately placed on the table one by one cubes, he touches everyone with his hand and answers: “My ... name is ... Nikolay” or “Ivanov .. . my surname". And finally, the observation material

confidently shows that during auto-corrections, speaking in 70% of cases corrects not the phrase as a whole, not the syntactic structure, but produces lexical, substitutions. Syntactic structures are primary .

Except for random reservations, replacements are made, as a rule, within the synonymic series (“came” - “came rushing” - “came running”; clarifications of every kind, for example: “in the morning” - “at dawn”; “late” - “completely late ”) or within the adjacent semantic fields:“ face in freckles of such ”-“ or a pockmarked face, in one word ”; “I almost missed the tram, that is, on the subway, of course”; “Wrapped in paper” - “in a piece of polyethylene”; “Picked up by hand, finger, that is”, etc.

The question of how our “internal lexicon,” our dictionary in our language memory, is far from being finally resolved. Thanks to the research of Professor A. A. Zalevskaya, much of this complex problem has become clearer with the help of the free association method. Recall once again that usually experience looks like. To the subject the leading experimenter suggests answering each of his, the instructor, the word with any other word or phrase that comes to mind to the subject. Sometimes it is necessary to give examples: "cow" - "milk" or "cow" - "calf", "cow" - "horned", etc. Some test subjects find the closest associations of the type of antonymic series ("cow" - "bull" ), others prefer syntagmatic connections ("brown cow"), and still others - whole detailed statements ("the cow brings us benefits").

In linguistics, they argue about “what is more important”, what is “more primary” - a word or text? Is it easy to answer this question by considering associative experiments? After all, the text-centric theory is confirmed by syntagmatic reactions to the verbal stimulus, and the lexicological reaction is confirmed by all the others. Let's turn to our own object of observation - the process of solving crossword puzzles.

It is given: “The river in Western Europe” (i.e., we are given an incomplete text that refers us to the “knowledge bank”, to its section, which is in charge of our geographical knowledge). We begin to sort out the names of European rivers in memory, without losing sight of the fact that the number of letters in it is 4: Rona, Sen, Raine, Oder (stop! This is Eastern Europe), Mine ... "Mine" matches the letter "m" at the beginning. In short, a single word is somehow

is drawn from the whole text in a broad sense (from any part of our knowledge). And if we are offered to name any word denoting “furniture”, then from our lexicon (section in charge of furniture) we can choose one of the row “table - wardrobe - chair - sofa - chair - chair ...” But each unit of the series is part of the old (in our experience) texts like "A sofa is also furniture" and "A room is decorated with furniture: tables, chairs, cabinets." Later, especially in the course of language learning, we gradually learn how to alienate individual words from texts, forcing them to live a “special life”. Therefore, a little bit literate person will easily fulfill the request “Name any word to“ o ”at the beginning,” and the illiterate will find it difficult to fulfill this request. For the same reason, a first grader may write “uslanabazar” or “mamaibabushka”, especially “nastule” ... Experience shows that one of the formerly favorite student games (“noodle”) knows its virtuosos, and the child or the illiterate will not play the “noodle”: the words for them exist in the text, not separately, especially not from individual letters.

Thus, the process of generating the utterance, which begins with the formation of communicative intent and the formation of a meaning (plan) in the system of the CPC, even before the actual verbalization begins, moves primarily to the stage of the future syntactic whole. The mood for a certain type of situation stimulates the choice of syntactic structures included in the statement. Then the filling of the syntactic structure with specific vocabulary begins; in case of failure, autocorrection is carried out (and this means that it is not always the mind immediately begins to effectively control the speech produced). But, undoubtedly, normal speech is formed with the participation of consciousness, under its control - otherwise there would be no autocorrection. Everyone knows, of course, cases where everything expressed contradicts the speaker’s intention (intent): it’s not necessary to correct individual errors, but to reformulate the statement entirely (“Sorry, I didn’t say what I wanted”).

A separate question is whether our every act of speech is a creative process. We will talk about this separately and later.

Now let us turn to the judgments of a famous, talented German writer, now, unfortunately, almost forgotten here and even in his homeland, in Germany - Heinrich von Kleist. He is very

seriously pondering the secrets of speech generation. So, a fragment from the letter of G. Kleist to his friend.

If I have a vague idea, remotely somehow related to what I'm looking for, then I just have to start talking, like my mind, forced to find the beginning of the end, will transform this hazy idea into full clarity, so that by the end of the period I, to my amazement, know what I wanted to know. I utter inarticulate sounds, stretch connecting words, use synonyms unnecessarily, and resort to other lengthening speech tricks to gain time needed to make my idea in the workshop of the mind ... A strange source of inspiration for the speaker is the human face in front of him; and often just one view, indicating to us that our half-expressed thought is already understood, gives us the opportunity to express the other half ... Rows of ideas and their designations follow side by side, and the movements of the mind, necessary for both, agree. The language here is not a constraint, it is not the semblance of a brake on the wheel of the mind, but a second, parallel rotating wheel on the same axis. It is a completely different matter if the mind has already coped with the thought before speaking. After all, then it remains only for him to express it ... If any idea is expressed confusedly, on the contrary, it is the most confused; expressed ideas are precisely the most clearly thought out ... For we do not know, he knows, first of all, a certain state of ours. Only among ignoramuses, people who yesterday jagged, and tomorrow they will forget again, the answer is ready ... And only an unreasonable examiner concludes from this confused answer that the speaker does not know what he should say.

Let us repeat once more, a little more in detail than before, how the program of turning thought into a word (“verbalization”) is carried out.

1. The statement is stimulated by the motive of this act of speech activity (Why, for what purpose do I speak?), And the speaker must first have a mindset for communication in general (it does not exist, for example, in a dream).

2. The initial stage of the formation of a statement is the stage of communicative intention , which is realized in the form of a mood for a certain typical situation of social interaction of people - for a specific speech genre, be it the genre of greeting, compliment, quarrel, report, chatter, etc. Depending on the specific situations of social interaction, he forms a general setting for a certain intonation tone of communication, a speech modality (for cooperative or conflict communication, for understanding or a communicative sub TAR and m. p.). In the same stage in the mind

the speaker gets an idea of ​​the goal (intention, illocution) of the future utterance (What type of communication am I tuning in?). Installation on a specific speech genre influences the formation of a common semantic (semantic) utterance program.

3. From the communicative intent, the process moves to the moment of formation of the semantic content of the future utterance (not only “for what”, but also “what exactly will I say”, I will start with the question or with the statement?) In the CPC (according to Zhinkin). This is the stage of the general idea . Here a holistic (perhaps still indistinct, diffuse) semantic “picture” of the future utterance is formed: meaning, semantics already exists, but there are no concrete words or syntactic structures yet.

4. The formed internal program (intention) begins to transform: the mechanism of recoding, the translation of meaning from the language of images and schemes to a specific national language, the language of meanings, begins to work. Here comes the primary verbal record of the future utterance: key concepts, sentences, fragments of phrases that carry a nuclear (rhematic) meaning. The primary verbal outline of a future utterance that arises in a person’s mind is filled with personal meanings: the first verbal formations (if voiced) are understandable only to the speaker himself.

5. The further formation of speech is the unfolding of the nuclear sense (theme) into a speech unit built in accordance with the psycholinguistic norm of textuality.

6. At the same time, the syntactic scheme of the future utterance is first formed. "Internal words", i.e., the meanings of words already become the "prototypes" of words external and gradually occupy "their" syntactic positions.

7. The next stage of speech generation is grammatical structuring and morphemic selection of specific vocabulary , after which:

8. The syllable motor program of external speech, articulation is being implemented.

All the mentioned stages of speech generation should not be imagined strictly separately and consistently; most likely, all of this — the process of generating speech — is transient, is realized in a split second, happens as G. Kleist imagined

when he wrote about "two parallel wheels on the same axis." Do not forget the parallel stage of control of speech production - allowable errors in case of “failures” and their correction.