Discourse interpretation in contemporary linguistic paradigm

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

State Institution «South-Ukrainian Ushynskyi National Pedagogical University»

Foreign Languages Faculty

Chair of Translation and Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Discourse interpretation in contemporary linguistic paradigm

Lona M. Derik, PhD (Candidate of Philological Sciences), Associate Professor

Summary

The presented article is aimed at elaborating the problem of interpreting discourse in the contemporary linguistic paradigm. The main objective of the paper consists in investigating discourse as a speech and mental phenomenon studied in accordance with the communicative and translational aspects. The subjects are the immanent features of the discourse as a speech and mental phenomenon. Employing the methods of applied linguistics and text analysis the author performs the all-sided review of the discourse in the communicative aspect as a complex speech construction of a supratextual level. Identifying the typological peculiarities for each separate type of the institutional discourse is the finding of research. The results of the carried-out research have proved that there exist typological peculiarities for each separate type of institutional discourse. The practical value of the research lies in the fact that the outlined regularities permit justifying the truthfulness of the thesis of the existential nature of discourse.

Key words: discourse, paradigm, phenomenon, immanent features, typological peculiarities, institutional discourse.

Аннотация

Представленная статья посвящена проблеме интерпретации дискурса в современной лингвистической парадигме. Цель статьи в изучении дискурса как речевого и ментального феномена в неразрывной связи с коммуникативным и переводческим аспектами. Предметом исследования являются имманентные характеристики дискурса как речевого и ментального феномена. С помощью методов прикладной лингвистики, текстологического анализа проведено исследование дискурса в коммуникативном аспекте как сложного речевого образования надтекстового уровня. В результате проведённого исследования выявлены типологические особенности каждого отдельного вида институционального дискурса. Практическая ценность полученных результатов в том, что подтверждена экзистенциальная природа дискурса.

Problem-setting and recent papers survey. The objective of the following research is the systematization and unification of the existing approaches to the study of discourse and their interpretation in the translational aspect. The theoretical grounding for the ideas supplied was formed on the basis of fundamental scientific works by E. Benvenist, P. Serio, M. Foucault, G. Lyons, Ch. Fillmore, Teun van Dijk, J. Fisk, A. Zholkovskyi, G. Lakoff, N. Chomsky, I. Kashkin, Yu. Lotman, M. Ilyin, R. Barthes, V. Karasik, Yu. Stepanov, V. Borbot'ko, F. Batsevic.

Discourse is widely postulated as a polysemantic term in the field of the Humanities, the subject which either directlyor indirectly implies language functional studies. Therefore, it should be treated as an object of interdisciplinary studies, such as theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, logics, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, literary studies, semiotics, historiography, theology, law, pedagogical studies, theory and practice of translation, communicative researches, political studies.

Task-setting. The urgency of this paper arises from the need for global synergetic all-sided review of discourse in the humanities in general and in contemporary linguistics in particular. The object of the work is discourse viewed as a speech and mental phenomenon. The subject is the unique nature of discourse with its immanent features (coherence, cohesion and intertextuality). The immediate tasks of the article have been predetermined by the above-mentioned objective and include, respectively: the disclosure of the difference between discourse and text; the elaboration of the discourse studies in bothcommunicative and translational aspects; the outline of the typological features for each separate type of the institutional discourse.

Practical research. The unique nature of the discourse is most prominently presented by the following schematic triangle:

S means Speech socially determined;

T means Text with extralinguistic information:

D means Discourse

Pic 1

The opposition Text: Discourse is viewed in the following aspect: discourse is understood as a text interwoven with life or the text presented dynamically through the prism of certain events.

Text is understood as a predominantly abstract and formal construct, discourse is interpreted as different ways of its actualization, viewed in the aspect of cognitive processes and their connection with extralinguistic factors. The term «discourse», unlike the term «text», is not applied to the texts whose ties with the reality have been irretrievably ruined (e. g. ancient texts).

From the linguistic point of view discourse is often defined as a complex communicative phenomenon which presupposes an impact of extralinguistic factors on its production and perception.

The communicational aspect of discourse is reflected in the focus on the extralinguistic factors influencing the communicative process, both in the sphere of its production and perception. Discourse is widely investigated as a complex communicative unit with its unique structural and semantic features. Its immanent peculiarities include cohesiveness and cohesion, fullness and independence of meaning which are realized linguistically by morphological forms and syntactic links. Inherent of discourse on all its levels is thematic, referential, eventual, temporal and local unity.

Discourse in the translational aspect is understood mainly as a speech practice, i.e. interactive activity of the communicants, the setting and maintenance of the contact, emotional and informational exchange, interaction and two-way influence, the interconnection of the variable communicative strategies and their verbal and non-verbal manifestations. Very important in this connection is the dependence on the extralinguistic knowledge, views, intentions and aims of the definite speaker.

The understanding of discourse as a text plunged in the communicative situation suggests its multidimensional nature. From the psycholinguistic point of view discourse is intriguing because of the possibility of switches from the inner code to the outer verbalization in the processes of speech generation and its interpretation with regards to the social-psychic types of language personalities and the role preferences. The linguostylistic discourse analysis is focused on distinguishing the speech registers, differentiating oral speech from the written one in all genre varieties, studying functional communication parameters on the basis of its units (the characteristics of functional styles). The structural and linguistic discourse description presupposes its segmentation and is aimed at foregrounding the textual proper communication peculiarities -- the sense and formal discourse coherence, the ways of topic switching, modal restrictors (hedges), large and small textual blocks, discourse polyphony understood as simultaneous communication on different levels of the text depth.

Communication is essentially incomplete and inferential -- it is impossible to tell everything about anything at any point in time. To derive the intended meaning from a spoken utterance or text, the hearer or reader needs to enrich or modify semantic representations of the linguistic input (literal or prototype meanings) by using inferences based on the context. This context, or background, is the space of possibilities that allows us to listen to both what is spoken and what is unspoken; and the meaning is created in an active process whereby linguistic form triggers interpreting rather than conveying information. This space of possibilities forming the context of a text or utterance is a subset of the recipient's entire cognitive environment, selected on the basis of relevance. A person's cognitive environment includes information that can be perceived externally, as well as knowledge stored in memory, and information derived from previous utterances or texts. This latter aspect of the cognitive environment is referred to as intertextuality.

Intertextuality is essentially a mechanism through which a text refers backward (or forward) to previous (or future) texts, by alluding to, adapting, or otherwise invoking meanings expressed in those other texts. In order to retrieve the full range of intended meaning in a given text, readers need to be able to recognise and understand such intertextual references. Failing to do so will result in partial understanding, or incomplete retrieval of the intended meaning of the text concerned. The implications of this for translation are clear, since the potential for failure to recognise thr intertextual reference between languages and across cultures is likely to be considerably greater than within them, for such recognition requires social knowledge.

Conclusions. The prominent distinctive features of discourse as a mental and speech phenomenon may be formulated as follows.

• The term «discourse» is close in sense to the concept «text», but its distinctive feature is dynamic nature unlike the static nature of the text;

• discourse functional interpretation is close to its understanding as a certain communicative act, which presupposes the existence of two dominant roles -- of the speaker (author) and of the addressee. However, the discourse distinctive feature is the presence of such important sense constituents as chronotopos, topicality and rituality;

• there also exists the third perspective of discourse research -- the study of speech communication from a proper textual point of view. This is particularly relevant for the analysis of deictics and the anaphoric and cataphoric links between the pronouns and the notional words;

• the interdisciplinary nature of the discourse studies is known as discourse analysis;

• discourse is characterized by a metalingual nature but like lower language units it is guided by certain rules and norms;

• the dominant opposition in discourse classification is the differentiation of the oral and written discourse based on the opposition of different channels of information distribution -- the acoustic and the visual. Despite the fact that the written speech has been considered predominant through a long period of time it is the oral discourse that is the original and fundamental form of language existence, while the written discourse is of secondary nature. Most researchers also outline the mental discourse;

• the prevailing strategies in discourse translation are foreignization, domestication and explication;

• the key issues in adequate discourse translation are the preservation of the semantic invariant and the faithful pragmatics rendering alongside with the accuracy of natural and cultural background presentation;

• the typological discrepancies among the distant languages result in certain translation difficulties and problems which should be dealt with in accordance with the existing practice of translation transformations techniques.

In the course of the research it has been concluded and experimentally and statistically proved that the oral discourse is the predominant and original language form of existence while the written discourse is of secondary nature. It has also been postulated that the pragmatic and the expressive potential of discourse shouldn't be underestimated especially in the aspect of its relevance in the successful communicative strategies realization. It has also been outlined that each type of institutional discourse is characterized by its unique etiquette and a certain set of typological linguistic peculiarities which proves the relevance of the hypothesis about the existential nature of discourse.

The perspectives of the paper are seen in the further elaboration of discourse studies on the basis of different typologically distant languages so as to prove the outlined regularities.

discourse mental existential communicative

References

1. Borbot'ko V.G. Prinicipy formirovanija diskursa : Ot psiholingvistiki к lingvosinergetike / V.G. Borbot'ko. -- M.: Knizhnyj dom «LIBROKOM», 2009. -- 288 p.

2. Karasik V.I. Jazykovoj krug: lichnost', koncepty, diskurs / V.I. Karasik. -- Volgograd : Peremena, 2002. -- 477 p.

3. Stepanov Yu.S. Al'ternativnyj mir, Diskurs, fakt і princip prichinnosti / Yu.S. Stepanov // Jazyk і nauka konca 20 veka. -- M. : RAN, 1996. -- P. 37-73.

4. Dijk van T.A. Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis / T.A. van Dijk // The sociolinguistic Reader. -- 1998. -- Vol. 2 : Gender and Discourse. -- P. 367-393.

Размещено на Allbest.ru