Shovak O. I. Fundamentals of the Theory of Speech Communication

a coherent text in combination with extralinguistic (pragmatic, sociocultural, psychological) and other factors;

text taken in an eventful aspect;

speech viewed as a purposeful social action;

a component, participating in the interaction of people and device of their consciousness (cognitive processes).

Discourse is speech "absorbed in life" (N.Arutyunova). Therefore the term “discourse” unlike the term “text” is not applied to ancient and other texts, connections of which with a living reality are not directly re-established. Discourse includes a paralinguistic accompaniment of speech (facial expression, gestures) performing the following basic functions, dictated by the discourse structure:

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  rhythmic ("autoconducting");
  
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  referential, connecting words with a subject area of language application (deictic gestures);
  
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  semantic (compare facial expression and gestures, accompanying some meanings);
  
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  emotionally evaluative function of influence on interlocutor, that is an illocutionary force (compare gestures, motives, beliefs).
  

Discourse is studied together with corresponding "forms of life" (compare reporting, interview, an examination dialogue, instruction, polite conversation, confession and others). With one of its sides discourse is turned to the pragmatic situation which is drawn for the coherence of discourse, its communicative adequacy, for clearing up its implications and presuppositions, for its interpretation. Vital context of discourse is modeled in the form of frames (typical situations) or scenarios (stressing the situation development). Elaboration of frames and scenarios is an important part of discourse theory. With its other side discourse is turned to mental processes of communication participants: ethnographical, psychological sociocultural rules and strategies of speech generation and perception in certain conditions (discourse processing), defining a necessary speed of speech, the degree of its coherence, the correlation of general and concrete, new and known, subjective (non-trivial) and generally accepted, explicit and implicit in discourse content, the degree of its spontaneity, the choice of means for achieving a necessary object, fixation of a speaker's point of view etc.
In the broad sense the term "discourse" is used for designating various types of speech and speech compositions (e.g. prescriptive, practical, oratorical discourse), the coherence and purport of which is re-established taking into account the whole complex of strictly speaking non-language factors. Discourse, according to Zellig Harris, is a sequence of the utterances. He observes that: “Stretches longer than one utterance are not usually considered in current descriptive linguistics, the linguist usually considers the interrelations of elements only within one utterance at a time. This yields a possible description of the material, since the interrelations of elements within each utterance (or utterance type) are worked out, and any longer discourse is describable as succession of utterances, i.e. a succession of elements having the stated interrelations. This restriction means that nothing is generally said about the interrelations among whole utterances within a sequence.” Grenoble (2000), explaining Harris’s definition of discourse, states that: “Harris interestingly enough ruled out the kind of study, which discourse analysis aims to do. He is of the view that linguistic research focuses on the elements within an utterance; discourse can be considered as a sequence of utterance. Harris argues that the study of the interrelations between utterances within a discourse, the scope of a discourse analysis required much more information than the theoretical apparatus of that time could handle. While this held true for 1950s and 1960s, roughly, but 1970s saw an emerging body of different approaches including pragmatics, conversation analysis, textual linguistics, and relevance theory.” Pragmatics as a general term, according to Grenoble (2000), can be understood in at least as many ways as discourse analysis; some linguists equate the two terms. In its narrow sense, it refers to linguistic theory that has been directly influenced by the philosophy of language. The search for larger linguistic units and structures has been pursued by scholars from many disciplines. Linguists investigate sentences when they are used in sequence. Ethnographers and sociologists study the structure of social interaction, especially as manifested in the way people enter into dialogue. Anthropologists analyze the structure of myths and folktales. Psychologists carry out experiments on the mental processes underlying comprehension. And further contributions have come from those concerned with artificial intelligence, Rhetoric, Philosophy and Style.
These approaches have a common concern: they stress the need to see language as a dynamic, social, interactive phenomenon - whether between speaker Mid listener, or writer and reader. It is argued that meaning is conveyed not by single sentences but by more complex exchanges, in which the participants' beliefs and expectations, the knowledge they share about each other and about the world, and the situation in which they interact, play a crucial part

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   Discourse and social practice