Between both solutions to the crisis of positivism at the beginning of the 20th century, V. N. Voloshinov chose K. Vossler’s idealistic neophilology, entirely rejecting Saussurianism. Voloshinov transposed Vossler’s stylistic individual idealism into sociological concepts: “spirit” becomes “ideology”, “culture” becomes “superstructure”, and “idealistic neophilology” becomes “sociological poetics”. This terminological rearrangement has caused constant misunderstandings in the interpretation of the book “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language”.
The paper deals with semiotic representation of discourse treated as a text immersed in a communicative situation. In this respect discourse may be analyzed from the point of view of 1) its form and content correlation and 2) types of its content. The first approach makes it possible to single out three contextually relevant levels of discourse manifestation: 1) a concrete situationally bound utterance or text, 2) a text genre and 3) a discourse type. The second approach is aimed at description of semiotically relevant contensive types of discourse.