Speech acts and Russian text-generating discourse

Abstract

The relevance of the study is determined by the hidden turbulence of such concepts often used in Russian studies as “speech activity”, “speech acts” and “discourse”. The aim of the work is to determine the genetic connections of this trinity and the functional purpose of each of the categories under consideration. The main research means is the authors’ method of discursive-modus analysis of artistic speech. The research materials were dictionary definitions from explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, in particular from “Dictionary of expressive stable phrases of the Russian language” compiled by V.Ju. Melikyan, as well as utterances extracted from the Russian National Corpus. The authors found that the communicative-speech act is a synergistic combination of mental-psychic and speech activity. Mental-psychic activity involves mental acts - the thought processes of the communicant at the moment of his locative readiness to make a statement and psychic activity of searching for adequate ways to reflect a communicatively significant event in the discursive consciousness of the communicants. Mental-psychic activity encodes and decodes the semantic content of the author's intentions with the help of the means of the language system. Speech activity produces speech acts - functional units of speech communication embodying a purposeful speech action. In conclusion, the categorical essence of the speech act and discourse are generalized. The perspective of the research is the development of a cognitive-pragmatic theory of speech-thinking activity based on the material of the Russian language.

Keywords

• communicative-speech activity
• speech act
• russian discourse
• utterance
• thinking processes
• communicative event