Lecture
Human language exists in the form of individual languages – Russian, English, French, and others. One could also say that each individual language exists in the consciousness of its speakers. Language penetrates the consciousness of every person “from outside”, because this language is used by the people around them. The genuine existence of a language can be spoken of only insofar as it is used. Language exists as a living language because it functions in speech, in utterances, in speech acts. Consequently, in order to understand what language is, we need to distinguish between the concepts of language and speech.
At one time the concepts of language and speech were synonymous. Then the idea of distinguishing language and speech was put forward by the linguist and philosopher of the first half of the 19th century Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). The great scholar's idea did not develop into a linguistic theory. The distinction between the concepts of language and speech was first clearly formulated and substantiated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). In Ferdinand de Saussure's view, “language is not an activity of the speaker; language is a ready-made product, passively registered by the speaker. Speech is an individual act of will and intelligence”. Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the concept of a person's “speech activity”. In his view, language as a social product is the most important part of speech activity, but only a part of it. The other part of speech activity has an individual side – speech. Ferdinand de Saussure described the differences between language and speech in the form of dichotomies, for example: language is social / speech is individual; language – potentiality / speech – realization; language – the property of society / speech is individual, etc. Some of these oppositions are presented in Table 2.
Table 2. Language and Speech
|
LANGUAGE |
SPEECH |
|
In principle constant (phonemic, morphological, lexical, and syntactic levels) |
Unrepeatable |
|
Does not exist in time |
Is realized in time |
|
Has its own boundaries |
Infinite |
|
The property of society |
Individual |
|
Does not exist in a situation |
Is always situationally conditioned |
The Russian linguist Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba went even further in distinguishing the concepts under discussion. In his work “On the Threefold Aspect of Linguistic Phenomena and on Experiment in Linguistics”, written in 1931, he defines language as the unity of the “inventory of language units” and the relations between them, that is, as a system of structured phenomena that serves as a repository of everything possible in the language and acts as a norm for all speakers of the language. Speech, in turn, is defined by L.V. Shcherba as speech activity, i.e., the totality of all acts of speaking and acts of understanding that are performed in a given language. Thus, L.V. Shcherba shows that language and speech are phenomena of different natures (language is a product of the activity of human consciousness, while speech is the activity of human organs), although one cannot exist without the other – they form a single whole.
In modern linguistics, speech activity is viewed as an act of communication between people by means of language, as communication. A manifestation within speech activity is the speech act.
Speech act is the individual and, each time, new use of language as a means of communication between people. A speech act presupposes speaking on the one hand, and listening and understanding on the other (recall what Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba said about this: speech activity is the totality of all acts of speaking and acts of understanding). The presence of these two aspects of speech activity is necessary: when there is a speaker, there is always a listener as well (even if that listener is oneself!). In written communication, these two aspects are realized as writing and reading.
Speech is a complex phenomenon. One can speak of oral and written speech, monologic and dialogic and so on.
There are significant differences in the perception of oral and written speech:
spatiotemporal (written speech exists in space, oral speech – in time);
written speech is characterized by stability (it is fixed and unchanging), oral speech – by variability;
written speech is linear (meaning unfolds sequentially), whereas in oral speech overlaps may occur (segments of speech may overlap one another).
But oral speech is richer than written speech, since it is accompanied by intonation, facial expressions, and gestures.
Thus, language is a system of material units that serve people's communication and are reflected in the consciousness of the collective; speech is the form of existence of language – language functions in speech.
Speaking of the fact that language functions in speech, we can say that speech itself is realized in speech sounds, which are perceived aurally or perceived visually in the form of letters. Speech sounds, as a natural phenomenon, have acoustic and articulatory aspects.
Speech sounds are a means of materializing morphemes and word forms, which act as a unity of sound and meaning.
Thus, sounds, upon becoming sounds of a language, represent a social phenomenon. They appear as “humanized nature”, humanized by higher nervous activity and by the speech apparatus, the articulatory base of the language, its sound inventory, and its phonetic laws.
Speaking in more detail about the acoustics of speech sounds, it should be said that speech sounds, by their physical nature, are oscillatory movements of the air caused by a sounding body (the organs of speech). The term speech apparatus, that is, the totality of the organs of speech (lips, teeth, tongue, palate, uvula, nasal cavity, pharynx, larynx, and certain others), is largely conventional. Since language is a social phenomenon, humans have by nature no special “organs of speech”. All the organs listed have direct biological functions as organs of smell, taste, respiration, and the intake and processing of food. The use of these organs for the production of speech is a human achievement. In the course of the history of human society, these organs underwent an evolution toward adaptation for the production and perception of speech.
Speech (phonational) breathing is of great importance in the production of speech. It differs from non-speech breathing in that, when we breathe without speaking, exhalation equals inhalation, and they follow one another rhythmically; when we speak, we inhale during pauses and then exhale gradually, in separate pulses.
Verbal communication (speech activity) is a type of activity (alongside other types of activity – labor, cognitive, play, etc.). The concept of verbal communication (speech activity) in this sense goes back to the psychological works of Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky and Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev. According to this concept, verbal communication is psychologically organized like other types of activity. It is characterized by motive, purposefulness, a heuristic character, and consists of several phases (orientation, planning, implementation of the plan, control). Any activity
With respect to speech activity, these phases were first identified by Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky. Verbal communication can act as an independent activity with a specific motivation; the components of this activity are speech actions, which have a goal, and speech operations, which may change depending on the conditions of communication. The result of speech activity is texts, that is, any speech products. In modern linguistics there exists a special discipline, text theory, whose attention is directed at all manner of texts.
Text theory – a philological discipline that arose in the second half of the 20th century at the intersection of textual criticism, text linguistics, poetics, rhetoric, semiotics, and hermeneutics.
As has already been said, in order to analyze communication it is necessary to identify its units. The text can be considered the unit of communication, and moreover, the text is the unit of the highest rank.
Text is a holistic communicative formation characterized by structural-semantic, functional, and compositional-stylistic unity and by a set of text categories: informativity, linearity, integrativity, recursiveness.
From the standpoint of text theory, the style of a text is a particular way of constructing it, aimed at achieving an emotional-aesthetic effect.
Text theory studies any sign formations; however, its main object is the verbal text. Studies in text theory are usually directed at two basic properties of the text: cohesion and coherence.
Cohesion of a text – a category characterizing the particular ways in which its elements are joined within the text: sentences, words, fragments, etc. Cohesion is built on the lexico-grammatical features of the language, which are studied by text grammar. Coherence – a characteristic of the text connected with its semantic unity, its unified structure. A text may be cohesive but not coherent, and, conversely, coherent but not cohesive (see the works of Yuri Alexandrovich Sorokin devoted to these and other categories of the text).
Functional analysis in text theory is mainly directed at literary texts, at establishing explicit and implicit meanings within them. The analytical methods of text theory also make it possible to reconstruct, within individual texts, more ancient texts or fragments thereof: thus, in fairy tales and epics, elements of earlier mythological texts are reconstructed.
It can be said that text theory deals with the analysis of the functioning and interrelation of signs – the elements of a text.
Many linguists acknowledge that all native speakers speak in texts, not in words and sentences, or at the very least, in sentences made up of words within texts. The text is the basic unit of communication. This understanding of the text is characteristic not only of linguists, but also of psychologists and psycholinguists.
From the standpoint of psychology, the text is the basic unit of communication, a phenomenon of real-life activity constructed by means of elements of the language system (see the works of Alexei Alexeyevich Leontiev and Valery Pavlovich Belyanin). The text, as a phenomenon of linguistic and extralinguistic reality, represents a complex phenomenon that performs various functions and is examined from various aspects: as a means of communication, a reflection of an individual's psychic life, a product of a particular historical epoch, a form of the existence of culture, etc. Thus, the phenomenon of the text can be defined in different ways.
For example, Victoria Vladimirovna Krasnykh proposes the following understanding of the text. A text is:
a verbal and sign-fixed (in oral and written form) product of verbal-cognitive activity;
a verbal and sign-fixed “reaction” to a situation;
a verbal-cognitive product possessing thematic, structural, and communicative unity;
a verbal-cognitive product possessing content completeness and informational self-sufficiency;
something objectively existing, material, and capable of being fixed;
something that changes the surrounding world, extralinguistic reality, by the very fact of its existence.
As a unit of communication, the text functions within discourse.
The theory of discourse – one of the most actively developing areas of modern linguistics (see, for example, the works of Mikhail Lvovich Makarov). Discourse theory represents a complex synthesis of scholarly results obtained in various fields of knowledge – in linguistics, psychology, sociology, and ethnography.
The attention of discourse researchers is directed not at the abstract language system, but at living speech under conditions of real communication. Thus, discourse theory is an interdisciplinary field that studies linguistic communication.
The category of discourse is one of the fundamental ones in communicative linguistics. The concept of discourse admits many scholarly interpretations. Three main approaches to the treatment of this concept are distinguished.
The formal approach: discourse as language above the level of the sentence or phrase, that is, discourse is understood as two or more sentences connected by meaning. “Formalists” build a hierarchy of the units making up the “whole”, the types of relations between them, and rules of configuration. The high level of abstraction of such models makes their application to the analysis of natural communication difficult;
The functional approach: this approach presupposes that the analysis of the functions of discourse is conditioned by the study of the functions of language in a broad sociocultural context;
The formal-functional approach: discourse is understood as an utterance. Discourse – not a primitive set of isolated units of language structure “larger than a sentence”, but a holistic totality of functionally organized, contextualized units of language use.
The relationship between the concepts of “discourse” and “text” gives rise to no small amount of debate in the scholarly world. In the early 1970s these terms were practically interchangeable. At present, discourse is understood as speech “immersed” in life, as distinct from text, which may pertain, for example, to ancient texts. By text may be meant a concrete sign product of the process of production and perception. A text can be verbal or non-verbal. Discourse is a dynamic process, of which text is a part. Besides text, discourse includes sociocultural conditions and mental processes.
The basic units of discourse – speech acts, their types, speech events, moves, exchanges, and others. At the foundation of the communicative approach to discourse analysis lies the theory of speech acts, developed in the works of the American logician John Searle.
The main idea of the theory of speech acts: by uttering a sentence in a communicative situation, we perform certain actions – we set the articulatory apparatus in motion, mention people, places, and objects, communicate something to the interlocutor, amuse them, irritate them, give orders, apologize, and so on; all these actions are conditioned by the speaker's intention or intent.
The structure of a speech act includes the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts.
1. The locutionary act is reduced to speech production as such;
2. the illocutionary act – the central concept of the theory of speech acts. It correlates with the communicative intention (intent) of the speaker;
3. the perlocutionary act expresses the result of the speech effect that the speaker intentionally achieves by performing the locutionary and illocutionary acts.
The term discourse analysis itself denotes the very method of analyzing coherent speech and is directed at the sociocultural, interactive aspects of linguistic communication. The focus of discourse analysis may be any fragment of linguistic communication: oral dialogue, written text, monologue, texts and genres of speech ranging from political debates to everyday conversation, and others.
Every speech utterance (a sentence, a text) is formed, generated – it does not pass ready-made “from thought into speech.” Proof of this lies in the fact that the speaker makes pauses (hesitations), which show that he cannot at once find the right word to express his thoughts or feelings. The speaker also produces self-corrections (corrections of his own speech) of what has already been said, or gives extended explanations.
Research findings show that an utterance begins with the formation of the future syntactic whole. In the course of self-correction, in 70% of cases the speaker corrects not the phrase as a whole, not the syntactic structure, but makes a lexical substitution. Syntactic structures are primary.
If we model the program by which thought is turned into word (the process of verbalization), we can provisionally single out the following stages.
The utterance is stimulated by the motive of the act of speech activity (why am I speaking, for what purpose?). Beforehand the speaker must have formed: a) a general disposition toward communication; b) a disposition toward communication with a particular person.
From the motive the process moves on to the moment when the semantic content of the future utterance is formed (“what exactly I am going to say”) in the universal objective code (UOC). Here an integral (perhaps still indistinct) semantic “picture” of the future utterance takes shape. There is meaning, but there are as yet no specific words or syntactic structures.
According to the conception of Nikolai Zhinkin, the basic component of thought is a special language of the intellect (UOC). This language is non-verbal in nature and constitutes a system of signs bearing the character of a sensory reflection of reality in consciousness. It is a language of schemas, images, tactile and olfactory imprints of reality, and so on. The UOC is the language in which the design of speech is formed. The dynamics of utterance production consist in recoding the content of the future speech product from the code of images and schemas into verbal language. The UOC is a language independent of the particular language a person speaks. It belongs to people of different linguistic cultures and, for this reason, constitutes a precondition for understanding speech in a foreign language.
The internal program that has taken shape (the meaning) begins to be transformed: a syntactic scheme of the future utterance of a particular national language is formed.
Grammatical structuring and the morphemic selection of specific vocabulary take place.
The syllable-by-syllable motor program of external speech (articulation) is realized.
The stages of speech production should not be imagined as separate; in reality the process of production is extremely rapid and is carried out within a fraction of a second.
It would seem that in the process of perceiving and understanding speech, the decoding of incoming speech information repeats the identified sequence of stages of text production in reverse order. By picking out words in the speech stream (or in writing), the listener (reader) “deciphers” their meanings. Possessing knowledge of grammatical laws, he identifies how the lexemes relate to one another and thereby grasps the content, the meaning, of the verbal message.
As shown by contemporary research by Russian and foreign scholars, this process proves to be considerably more complex. Lexico-grammatical knowledge plays an important role in comprehension, but comprehension is not a passive, mechanical movement from meaning to sense. It is a complex psychological process. The process of comprehension begins with a search for the general idea of the utterance. Of enormous importance here are the phenomena of prediction, anticipation, and the mental set that arise in the recipient's consciousness. From the very first moments the recipient displays a reciprocal mental activity directed at grasping the speaker's aim, motive, and the hidden meaning of the message.
The process of decoding has an initially integral character and takes into account knowledge of the addressee, the nature of the relations between the interlocutors, and the deliberate non-verbal as well as unconscious manifestations of the speaker. Of great importance in decoding messages is adequate reference (the correlation of the utterance with a real situation of events). As Nikolai Zhinkin put it, “We understand not speech, but reality.” Ignorance of the reality that stands behind an utterance can be a cause of communicative misunderstandings.
The word hermeneutics is of Greek origin. It literally means “to proclaim,” “to interpret,” “to explain.” In the broad sense hermeneutics is the art of interpreting texts.
Hermeneutics arose in remote antiquity, but as a field of research it took shape only in the twentieth century. In the present-day system of philological and non-philological sciences there exists philological hermeneutics.
Philological hermeneutics is a scholarly discipline that studies the processes of text understanding. There are several schools of hermeneutics in Russia and abroad. In Russia the Tver School of Hermeneutics is well known, represented by Georgy Bogin and a number of other scholars.
The subject of philological hermeneutics is text understanding.
The question of the essence of text understanding is one of the most difficult in philology. Let us give several widely used definitions of understanding:
the process of grasping the meaning (or meanings) of a text;
the assimilation of another's experiences, thoughts, and decisions, “objectified” in the text;
movement toward knowledge, the production of knowledge;
the reconstruction of the situation of the text author's action;
the process of grasping the internal connections within a text.
Philological hermeneutics operates with such objects of research as the understanding person, the text, and meaningfulness.
Understanding is an activity that is properly human, since at the basis of understanding lies the ability to use language as a sign system, which is a property peculiar to man alone.
To understand a text, to assimilate its meaningfulness, means to bring one's whole experience to bear on the text and, in doing so, to accept its meaningfulness so that it becomes the property of our own subjectivity. Understanding presupposes the assimilation of the reality that stands behind the text.
Understanding is both the process of understanding itself and the final result of that process (the result of understanding).
The main problem of philological hermeneutics is the problem of the understanding/non-understanding of a text, which arises when a hermeneutic situation is “not assimilated.” A hermeneutic situation is a situation in which a text can either be understood or not be understood. Hermeneutic activity (that is, activity directed at understanding a text), once the hermeneutic situation is resolved, can end in one of two ways from the standpoint of philological hermeneutics (that is, the text will be understood or not understood).
Philological hermeneutics maintains that there are no texts that are inherently incomprehensible, there are only texts that someone has failed to understand. Non-understanding is admissible, forgivable, and natural.
The complexity of the process of understanding a text lies in the fact that collective experience is brought to bear on the text in the form of an individual effort to assimilate the text's meaningfulness. This meaningfulness is itself also socially significant, but each person must choose the optimal techniques of understanding for himself.
Through his own reflective action the individual fixes the facets of what is understood (those sides of the assimilated meaningfulness of the text that are personally and socially significant for the given hermeneutic situation). One facet of what is understood is “what the author sought to say”; another is “what this place in the text says to a person of today”; a third is “what of what has been understood I can bring into activity,” and so on.
The ultimate goal of philological hermeneutics is to help people communicate in a variety of hermeneutic situations, including the understanding of speech and other works, and to overcome the failure of one person to understand another.
Language is the basis of our communication. By means of language we create a great variety of speech works – oral and written; it allows us to shape our thoughts and ideas into texts, the storage and transmission of which from generation to generation is a precondition for the existence of culture.
How do people understand texts? It would seem that to understand any text (oral/written) it is enough to have lexico-grammatical knowledge of the language. This is what traditional linguistics holds. Specialists in psycholinguistics maintain that for understanding a text encyclopedic knowledge (knowledge of our world, of our life) is also very important. For behind any text there always stands some reality (on the processes of text understanding and the knowledge that stands behind a text, see, for example, the works of Alexandra Zalevskaya).
As already mentioned above, specialists in text linguistics distinguish in a text the properties of coherence (unity) and cohesion.
The cohesion (Russian kogeziya) of a text is a linguistic category characterizing the particular way in which its elements – sentences, words, fragments, and so on – are joined within the text. It is built on the basis of the lexico-grammatical features of the language.
The notion of the coherence of a text goes beyond the bounds of traditional linguistics. It is a purely psycholinguistic category. Coherence (wholeness) presupposes the unity of the design, of the semantic program out of which the text develops. Only that speech segment is called coherent which is grounded in some semantic unity (see the works of Yuri Sorokin).
The psycholinguistic study of a text presupposes penetrating into its design, into the core of its meaning. One of the possible ways of such penetration may be, for example, the identification of the text's key words, which convey its basic content in condensed form.
On the surface, the perception and understanding of speech seems to occur instantaneously; however, understanding is achieved through a multi-stage processing of the perceived (“input”) signal (a stream of sounds or a sequence of graphemes). This signal must be recognized as a meaningful signal. A person cannot always immediately segment the speech stream correctly into meaningful units, or identify the needed meaning of a word (for example, of a polysemous word or a paronym). In such a case an incorrect decision regarding the meaning of the text may be made.
Understanding is the positive result of complex perceptual-mnemonic activity. It is the product of the interaction of a number of mental processes: perception, thought, memory.
In psycholinguistics, when discussing the processes of text understanding, the notion of the projection of the text is considered (Yuri Sorokin, Alexandra Zalevskaya), or the image of the content of the text (Alexei Leontiev). From the standpoint of the process of constructing the projection of the text, the understanding of a text includes five components: author – the author's projection of the text – the body of the text – recipient – the recipient's projection of the text.
The projection of the text is a mental formation (in various terminologies, the concept of the text, the meaning of the text, and so on), a product of the process of the semantic perception of the text by the recipient, one that approximates, to a greater or lesser degree, the author's own variant of the text's projection.
Note that of the five components of the process of understanding, only one – the body of the text – remains unchanged (even the author may reinterpret his own text!).
There are also other models of text understanding (the spiral model, the vortex model, understanding on the basis of key words, and others – these models were developed by the Tver School of Psycholinguistics).
Alexei Leontiev emphasized the dynamism, the processual nature of understanding. Understanding and mutual understanding are impossible outside the constant interaction of a person's linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge.
Thus it can be said that the understanding of a text represents a complex psychological process, in which a person takes the most active part with his knowledge (general, linguistic, specialized) and his experience. It is precisely a person's life experience that allows him to grasp, to understand, the meaning of a given text.
Above we spoke of verbal communication. But what other kinds of communication are there? When and where does it take place?
It is sometimes said that communication is an exchange of information. What exactly is “exchanged” when communication takes place?
What kinds of texts are there? Give examples of different types of texts. Which texts function in non-verbal communication?
Why must a text necessarily be coherent?
What does the degree of “coincidence” between the author's projection of the text and the recipient's projection of the text depend on?
What phenomenon is being played on in the poem below?
Отцвели настурции,
Парк осенний гол.
Не обыграть нас Турции,
Забит последний гол. (untranslatable pun kept in the original: the poem plays on false word-boundary segmentation – “настурции” [‘nasturtiums’] is misheard as “нас Турции” [‘us, Turkey's’], since the two phrases are pronounced identically)
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