Общие проблемы теории речевых жанров

The increased interest in the analysis of human verbal behavior leads to the need to define a basic unit of the communication sphere which could serve as the basis of its analysis. The first part of the article provides an overview of different speech units proposed by various authors, such as a speech act (J. Austin and J. Searle), speech genre (M. Bakhtin), situational, aspect and parametric model of communicative behavior (I. Sternin), speech action pattern (K. Ehlich und J. Rehbein).

This article discusses intertextuality, a critical but still an under-researched aspect of speech genres (SG). We focus on the intertextual content of Michael Bakhtin’s concept of the SG which he viewed as the «word of the other». The concept of a secondary genre (in terms of the diachronic nature of the SG) is shown as essential and several classifications of secondary SGs based on intertextuality are proposed.

The article contains a characterization of some sociosemiotic rules that regulate the choice and arrangement of language units in the process of speech generation. Arguments are offered in favour of the view that the rules should be included into the generative model of an utterance. A dependency is ascertained between the constituent parts of a communicative register (a category closely related to that of speech genre) and the word selection rules of speech generation. The sociosemiotic rules of choosing a name for the agent serve as an example.

The article is devoted to the description of lexeme «truth» functioning features entering different speech genres. The word «truth» is referred to the group of discourse words providing speech coherence, reflecting the process of interaction between the speaker and listener, as well as conveying attitude of the speaker to what has been said. The study considers broad understanding of discourse words as structural components of the speech genre that realize illocutionary functions and are associated with speech steps of the speaker in the creation of genre.

The article discusses the theoretical and practical problems related to the study of speech genres on the basis of the material of databases, and generally using the methods of corpus linguistics. In the foreground there is the problem of “key phrases”, or text markers of speech genres, which can be searched in the case. According to the authors, the key phrase of speech genre is its essential characteristic, which is present in speech genre competence of a native speaker and should be included in the relevant speech genre description as an additional parameter.

The possibility of speech genristic approach to non-verbal communication is discussed in the article. Traditionally, only verbal forms of sentences are regarded as speech genres. However, the contemporary theory of speech communication differenciates  verbal and non-verbal speech. Therefore,  the speech genres may be non-verbal too, that is well traced in nowadays speech interaction, mainly on the level of everyday communication.

F. de Saussure determined rigid limits of priorities in linguistics and separated language from speech that has no system in his opinion. M. M. Bakhtin in his work «The Problem of Speech Genres» accepted the differentiation of language and speech (utterance in his system of terms) unlike V. N. Voloshinov but he considered the concentration on the problems of language insufficient and the study of speech necessary. In the field of speech he singled out the most stable component – speech genres that are set to speakers together with language.

The article proves the introduction of genre category concept into the speech genres analysis which helps to describe the linguistic definiteness of the genres. Genre categories are distinguished not on grammatical, but on an extralinguistic, intentional basis. Three types of categories – dialogism, illocution, and referentiality are offered for description of speech genres. Each category has its field the of different language units, composition methods, and nonverbal means.

The article is devoted to one of the most important and obvious aspects of speech genres – relation of speech genres and evaluation. This issue is im-portant not only for the theory of speech genres, but also for linguistics in general, although it is far from being solved. We discuss the key concept of this problem – “form of evaluation” – a kind of genre norms that determine, on the one hand, the pragmatic, stylistic, linguistic modeling of evaluative actions, on the other – the differences between adjacent evaluative genres.

This article suggests a comprehensive analysis of the complex speech genres as a way to study the variability of their model and as an instrument of developing the general classification of complex speech genres.