3. New time (XVII – XIX centuries) and psycholinguistics

During this period, the process of speech formation is directly or indirectly discussed in the scientific works of many scientists. The discussion goes on within the framework of various areas of knowledge (philosophy, psychology, semiology, linguistics, neuroscience, logopathology, etc.) and from the standpoint of various scientific fields (mechanics, functionalism, etc.). Diverse and contradictory hypotheses are put forward, there is an active and, as a rule, productive discussion.

The idea of ​​linguistic universals continues to excite the minds of many scientists. So, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) develops the idea of ​​creating a universal language. His base, from the point of view of F. Bacon, should be universal concepts, which themselves determine the forms of their expression.

René Descartes (1596–1650), proceeding from the understanding of the world as a “machine” (although extremely diverse and complex), proposed the creation of a “philosophical language” based on, in particular, the original (indecomposable) concepts and relations between them . According to certain rules, they are implemented in a single way of expression (lexical, morphological and syntactic). In other words, after sv. Augustine, A. Boethius and other scientists postulated the idea of ​​nuclear and surface structures in the production and perception of speech. [32] The idea of ​​a universal language was deeply developed by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). Like R. Descartes, he spoke about the “alphabet of human thought,” that is, the elementary meanings (concepts), the rules of their combinatorics, and the most effective (linguistic) ways of expressing them.

One of the first scientific works in the field of studying the laws of natural languages ​​was the “Universal rational grammar ...” published by Antoine Arno (1612–1694) and Claude Lanslo (1616–1695), published in 1660. [33] The authors emphasize the sign and communication nature of speech, which, in essence, determines its functioning. They write: “To speak means to express one’s thoughts with signs that people have invented for this purpose” (ibid., P. 19). There are two sides to signs: “The first is what they are by nature, that is, as sounds and signs of a letter. The second is their meaning, that is, the way people use them to express their thoughts ”(p. 19). At the same time, A. Arnaud and C. Lanslo argue, “the different kinds of meanings contained in words can be understood only if we first understand ourselves what is happening in our thoughts, because the words were invented only in order to convey our thoughts "(ibid., p. 29).

The main unit of speech, the authors consider the proposal. They write: “People do not speak only to express what they imagine, but almost always to express judgment on the things that they imagine” (ibid., P. 30). The judgment about things is called a sentence (proposition). Each sentence contains two members: a subject (subject of speech) and an attribute (that which is approved ).

The authors emphasize the multifunctional nature of speech: “... we can consider, on the one hand, the object of our thought, and on the other, the form, or the way of our thought, and its main form is judgment. To this, however, should be added a conjunction, a disjunction, and other similar mental acts, as well as all other movements of the soul: desires, orders, questions, etc. ”(p. 30).

From the point of view of A. Arno and C. Lanslo, to express the processes occurring in our consciousness, all words are divided into two groups: words denoting objects of thought (names, pronouns, etc.), and words denoting form and way of thinking (verbs, unions and interjections); there are cases and prepositions for expressing relationships, articles, pronouns and other parts of speech are functional in nature. Emphasis is placed on the role of verbs in speech, bearing (as it is now customary to define in the SP) the predicative function - the main one in speech, without which it is practically impossible. Verbs are words “that show how thought flows,” write A. Arnaud and C. Lanslo. The peculiarity of the verb is, they continue, that it is a word, the main purpose of which is to denote a statement. A speech containing a verb is a speech of a person who is not only aware of some objects, but also judges them, asserts something about them ”(ibid., P. 64). “Verbs are also used to refer to other movements of our spirit. For example, to express wishes, requests, orders, etc. ”(ibid., P. 65). The authors postulate, using modern terminology, the idea of ​​deep and superficial semantic-syntactic structures: they write about “associated sentences” that “are often in our thoughts without being expressed verbally” (ibid., P. 51).

The ideas of A. Arnaud and C. Lanslo were reflected in the universal (philosophical, universal) grammars of many authors, for example N. Bose (1767), S. de Mars (1769), A. Cour de Jebelene (1777) and, perhaps most clearly in the grammars of D. Harris (1709–1786) and E. Condillac (1715–1780).

D. Harris (1751), like other authors of universal grammars, believes that all people have a single mechanism of thinking. Speech is a means of expression of thinking. At the same time, the process of speaking (that is, the generation of speech) goes from thoughts to words, and the process of listening (that is, perception-understanding) goes from words to thoughts. Since the purpose of speech is to convey the content of thinking, the main ones in speech are “large units”: sentences and periods. [34] In any sentence, something is affirmed or expressed desire. Therefore, there are a limited number of types of sentences. There are only objects and phenomena (relations) in the world, in connection with which all words are divided into two classes: words expressing substances and attribute words; the formal function is defined by the “words-determinants” (articles, bundles).

E. Condillac (1775) develops the ideas of the priority of the semantics of language, the inseparable connection between thinking and language with the dominance of the laws of thinking. Discussing these problems, he probably first addresses the field of individual speech (language) experience.

Since the beginning of the XIX century. there is a certain departure from the traditions of universal grammars. Scientists note the discrepancy between logic and grammar. Therefore, language categories have become regarded as mental. However, the majority of researchers had this orientation of study, at least until the middle of the 19th century, purely rational. In other words, speech activity was studied in the universal psychological plan, outside the activity of specific individuals. The most prominent representative of this direction was the eminent scientist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835).

The creator of scientific linguistics V. Humboldt, who owns the idea of ​​defining speech as speech activity and understanding the language as a link between society (“the public”) and man, can be considered one of the forerunners of psycholinguistics. V. Humboldt was the first to introduce the concept of linguistic consciousness into linguistics. He pointed out: “Language in its interdependent relations is the creation of the national language consciousness” (62, p. 47). The person, according to V. Humboldt, appears in his perception of the world entirely subordinate to the language that leads him through life as a guide. Practical activity of people obeys the language as "the creator of the existing world." Thus, Humboldt believed that language is both a sign and a reflection of reality.

The underlying concept of V. Humboldt is the understanding of the process of using language in speech as a conscious activity. “Language,” writes V. Humboldt, “should be viewed not as a dead product, but as a creative process.” [35] “Language is not a product of activity (ergon), but activity (energeia)”; [36] it should not be viewed as a product, but as a “creative process”. V. Humboldt stresses that “the essence of language consists in the very act of its reproduction. Live speech is the first and true state of the language: this should not be forgotten in the study of languages, if we want to enter the living being of language. ”[37] V. Humboldt believes that "the linguistic ability rests in the depths of the soul of each individual person, but is activated only when communicating." [38] The scientist draws attention to the laws (as they would say now - the “rules”) of the functioning of the language, the creative nature of its use. He writes: “A language cannot be presented once and for all as finished material that can be counted in all its quantity; it must be presented forever reborn according to certain laws; but the volume of material being revived, and in some ways the very form of revival remain unlimited. ”[39] V. Humboldt emphasizes the communication and active nature of speech activity, its dependence on human needs, various contextual influences. On this occasion, he, in particular, writes: “The process of speech cannot be compared with the simple transfer of material. The listener, as well as the speaker, has to recreate it with his inner strength, and all that he perceives is reduced only to the stimulus that causes the same phenomenon. Thus, every person has a language in its entirety, which means only that each person has the desire to regulate, stimulated and limited by a certain force, to carry out the activities of the language in accordance with their external or internal needs, moreover, so as to be understood by others. "[40]

The ideas of W. Humboldt that the language determines the attitude of man to objective reality, transforms the external world into the property of the spirit, formed the basis of the philosophical trend in linguistics, which was called neo-Humboldtism (L. Wittgenstein, L. Weisgerber, I. Trier and others). Neo-Humboldtians believed that concepts are not a reflection of objective reality, but products of symbolic knowledge, conditioned by linguistic signs, symbols. Based on this, language determines thinking, turns the world around us into ideas, “verbalizes” them (5, 119, 197).

Simultaneously with the universal psychological approach to the study of speech activity, the individual psychological approach also developed, which began to manifest itself most noticeably from the mid-19th century. At the beginning of the XIX century. it was just being conceived, and specialists in the study and correction of speech pathology played a big role in this regard.

Thus, Franz Gall (1758–1828), the creator of the theoretical concept of “phrenology,” and at the same time an eminent neurologist and logopathologist, [41] outlined a verbal memory (“word feeling”) and a grammatical memory (“language ability”) based on the study of aphasia cases . F. Gall quite clearly distinguished in speech activity symbolic (sign) and pronunciation (articulatory) functions. At the same time, he distinguished between the involuntary (automated) and arbitrary forms of speech associated with "late acquired abilities." F. Gall showed the ambiguous nature of the relationship between perception and thinking, on the one hand, and speech, on the other. Thus, some of his patients with aphasia preserved processes of perception and thinking, but arbitrary speech was seriously disturbed (although involuntarily patients could have words that they were previously offered to repeat, some could not be repeated). Unfortunately, these and other very productive ideas of F. Gaul, relating to the norm and pathology of speech, did not find understanding and support at that time.

J. Buyo (1796–1881), relying on the analysis of cases of aphasia, established (1825) that speech is a special function that does not depend on the state of articulation. He was one of the first who drew attention to the difference between voluntary and involuntary movements in a speech act.

From the middle of the XIX century. individual psychological approach to the study of speech activity has found expression in many scientists - psychologists, philologists, neurologists and others.

The pupil of V. von Humboldt G. Steinthal (1823–1899) - one of the creators of the individual psychological direction in the study of language - believed that language, being a social phenomenon, relies on psychological categories. The language itself G. Steinthal divided into language ability, speech (speaking) and language material. According to G. Steinthal, a language researcher must first of all be interested in the process of “rendering” (speaking). This process includes three components: (1) thought content; (2) internal speech; (3) articulation. G. Steinthal, unlike his teacher, who viewed language in dialectics - both as a process and as a given given, as part of human mental activity, and finally as a social phenomenon - understood the language only as a process. He interpreted the mechanism of individual speech activity in the following way: “We must clearly distinguish three things that are valid when speaking: organic mechanics, psychic mechanics, and subject to expression ... conceptual or ideological content. The purpose of speech is the presentation and display of content through mental and organic mechanics. We can imagine organic mechanics in the form of an organ, psychic mechanics in the form of an organist, content in the form of a composer ”(331, p. 483).

From the point of view of V. Wundt (1822–1920), language is the psycho-physiological activity of a person. The basis of grammatical categories are concepts. W. Wundt rightly insisted that language is a multi-form phenomenon that includes sound, kinetic (mimic-gestural) and written form (133, 197).

The ideas of V. Humboldt and G. Steinthal were developed in the works of the famous Russian linguist A.A. Potebni (1835–1897). According to A.A. Potebnia, a speech act is an extremely mental phenomenon, but language, a word brings a cultural, social beginning into this act: “Language objectifies thought ... Thought is idealized and freed from the word ... influence of direct sensory perceptions ... There is a language the condition of the progress of nations, why it is an organ of thought of an individual ”(176, p. 237).

A.A. Potebnya considers language as a means of creating thought. In his famous book, Thought and Language (1892), as well as in other studies, he argues that language is the main mode of thinking, creative activity that organizes thought. According to A. Potebni, the word should distinguish between its “external form”, i.e. articulate sound, content objectified by means of sounds, and “internal form”, or the nearest etymological meaning of the word, the way content is expressed. AA. Potebnya writes: “The word is an expression of thought only so far as it serves as a means to create it; the inner form, the only objective content of the word, matters only because it modifies and perfects those aggregates of perceptions that it finds in the soul. ”[42] The true state of the language is speech. “The meaning of the word,” says AA. Potebnya - is possible only in speech. The word torn out of the connection is dead, does not function, does not reveal either its lexical or, all the more formal, properties, because it does not have them. ”[43] AA Potebnya emphasizes the priority of the content over the form: “There is no form, presence and function that would be recognized differently by meaning, that is, by communication with other words and forms in speech and language.” [44] At the same time, the author argues that grammatical categories are realized only in syntax. The basic unit of language is a sentence, and the verb creates a sentence. AA Potebnya draws attention to the active creative nature of both the process of generation and speech perception. On this occasion, he, in particular, writes: “The meaning of the word is not transmitted, and the word repeated by the child until it makes no sense for him, until he himself connects with him known images, explains his perceptions that constitute his personal, exclusive property ". [45] The perception-understanding of speech is considered by A. A. Potebney as “the creation of known content in oneself about external excitations. The understanding of another person comes from the “understanding of oneself” (176, p. 42).

A great contribution to the development of linguistic science and the creation of prerequisites for the emergence of psycholinguistics was made by the outstanding Russian linguist Ivan Alexandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929), who defined language as a complex objectively mental phenomenon consisting of many groups of heterogeneous representations. Its first element is the phonations, which correspond to the group of phonational representations and representations of physiological movements. The second element is mental. It is formed by groups of auditory representations - representations of the acoustic results of the above physiological movements. The third element - cerebration - this group exclusively cerebrational representations (25, p. 237). “The essence of the language,” the scientist writes, “is only cerebration.” [46]

I.A. Baudouin believed that “the essence of human language is exclusively psychic. The existence and development of language is due to purely mental laws. There is not and can not be in human speech or in the language of a single phenomenon that would not be at the same time psychic ”(ibid., P. 238).

According to I.A. Baudouin, speech is based on "the sociable character of a person and his need to translate his thoughts into the perceived products of his own organism and communicate them to beings like him, that is, to other people" (25, p. 238).

I.A.Baudouin argued that "there are not some languages ​​floating in the air, but only people who are gifted with linguistic thinking." [47] At the same time, he characterizes language as a phenomenon “psychic-social” or “psychic-social”. Language is understood not as an organism locked in itself, but as an “instrument and activity”. Language is a “continuously repeating process”, which is based on “the sociable character of a person and his need to translate his thoughts into the perceived products of his own organism and communicate them to other people [48]”. I.A.Baudouin emphasized that the language is multifunctional, its manifestations depend on many factors of nonverbal activity and situations in which the activity takes place - nonverbal and speech. He believed that it was necessary “to pay attention to the difference between the solemn and everyday language, family and social - in general, to the difference of language in different circumstances of life, to the difference of language and speech, common language and the language of specialists, to change the language in accordance with different mood of a person: language feelings, language of imagination, language of mind, etc. "[49]

I.A. Baudouin was the first professional linguist who was already in the mid-80s. XIX century.encouraged to explore a variety of language disorders to understand the normal mechanisms of the language. He gave a brilliant example of such a study. [50] Analyzing the dynamics of language learning in a child with expressive alalia (aphasia, in the author's terminology), he showed, in particular, that the nature of language units (elements) is determined not only by the “original” properties but to a large extent by the position they occupy in the context, the function they perform. In this work, it is also shown that in the “ontogenesis of language” a child masters the rules for choosing and combining linguistic units (elements). Based on the analysis of the characteristics of mastering these rules, one can predict the course and outcome of the child’s speech development. Call I.A.Baudouin to learn the pathology of the language was picked up by many representatives of the Petersburg (later - Leningrad) linguistic school: first of all, his student and the outstanding linguist L.V. Scherba, and also L.R. Zinder and L.V. Bondarko, V.K. Orfinskaya, E.F. Sobotovich, R.I. Lalaeva, Yu.I. Kuzmin [51] and others

Since the second half of the XIX century. a great contribution to understanding the processes of speech formation was made by researchers working in the field of logopathology. [52] So, Karl Wernicke (1848-1905) established that speech is a multi-stage process (1874). In his opinion, the verbal material from the auditory memory passes into the center of ideation (the center of intelligence, thinking), from which it goes to the center of the motor memory and then into the articulatory apparatus proper. [53]

A. Kussmaul (1877) - the famous neurologist, one of the "founders" of logopathology and speech therapy - considered speech as one of the sign systems. Speech is a product of the special symbolic function of the soul. “The symbolic function,” stated A. Kussmaul, “represents a certain form of instinct and intellect, differing from others only in the purpose towards which it is directed, to achieve an understanding of things; but then, like the others, it represents the resultant sensations, perceptions, ideas, on the one hand, and reflex and associative adaptations, on the other. ”[54] According to A. Kussmaul, the verbal expression of thought is divided into three stages (processes): (1) “preparation” for speech, which takes place in the soul and mind; (2) diction -the work of "inner words" together with syntax and (3) articulation - the formation of an outer word.

In the 60-80-ies. XIX century.X. Jackson (1835–1911), an eminent neurologist and logopathologist, paid close attention to the functional and multi-level nature of speech. X. Jackson considered the speech process as a proposition, which is “a connection of images that are in certain relations with each other.” [55] However, X. Jackson believed that "the perfection of speech is not in the number of words and not in the complexity of their organization, but in the exact fit, adaptation to specific and non-standard circumstances." [56] Based on clinical studies, X. Jackson formulated a statement about the specific features of voluntary and involuntary manifestations of speech, about the distinction of "emotional and intellectual language" [57] and others.