Филологические науки/3.Теоретические и методологические проблемы исследования языка

E. I. Guseinova

Sumy National agrarian University, Ukraine

Discourse Versus Text

The modern scientific approach considers discourse as the major form of daily vital practice of a human being and defines it as the complex communicative phenomenon, including apart form the text, extralinguistic factors (knowledge of the world, opinions, settings, aims of the addresser), necessary for understanding the text.

The definition of the notion “discourse” creates certain difficulties as it appeared to be on the joint of an array of disciplines, such as Linguistics, Anthropology, Literary Criticism, Ethnography, Sociology, Sociolinguistics, Philosophy, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Psychology and others. Nevertheless, one can assert, that owing to the efforts of many scientists in different spheres, the theory of discourse is being developed nowadays in the independent interdisciplinary area, reflecting the general tendency to the integration in the progress of modern science.

The modern discourse theory goes back to the antique rhetoric; however, it began developing into an independent science only in the middle of the sixties of the XX century in the course of numerous researches, which received the name “Linguistics of Text”. The interest in studying the text had been caused by the aspiration to explain language as an integral means of communication, to study in a more profound way language connections with various spheres of human activity, expressed through the text. Originally the term “linguistics of text” was considered by many scientists not a suitable one, and it was then, that in the works of some linguists the term “discourse” appeared.

At those times, as well as nowadays, this term is unfortunately not explicitly defined. In English there are general definitions of the term, which mean “to speak about” or “to hold forth on” a topic .Within linguistics, discourse is used to refer to language and linguistic structures above the level of the sentence. In discourse analysis, discourse is used to refer to those elements which are seen to be rule-governed and systematic, but which do not occur at the level of the word or the phrase. For example, in discourse analysis it is possible to analyze the opening or the closing places in a conversation - these may consist of several sentences, and constitute a larger unit of the analysis than the sentence. The term discourse is also used when linguists refer to a piece of the extended text or conversation which has some form of internal coherence. Many linguists and literary theoreticians use a slightly simplified definition of discourse to refer to a group of statements, which are concerned with a particular subject area; for example, a discourse of femininity or a discourse of racism. Other linguists also use discourse in a similar way to the word register and refer to a discourse of advertising or a legal discourse, where discourse becomes defined as the language which occurs within a particular context. Even in these definitions of discourse, it is clear that there is a concern with some extended texts and the use of language and structures above the level of the sentence.

As we see, the range of discourse definitions is really wide. In the course of linguistic research they have been changing constantly and every time the appearance of a new interpretation did not eliminate the previous one, and nowadays they coexist and are used parallelly. But according to M. Sushko-Bezdenezhnuh, there can be distinguished three main approaches to the definition of discourse:

1. The earliest interpretation, based, first of all, on the Anglo-Saxon linguistic tradition (D. Schifrin, D. Cristal, G. Cook): discourse - is actually a dialogue, an interaction between the speaker and the listener; an authentic daily communication, mainly oral, included in the wide communicative context.

2. The second approach is based on the T. van Dijk's conception of the communicative nature of text: discourse- is a communicative phenomenon, which is of procedural character, occurs in a certain out-of-lingual context and is fixed in speech as a formal structure - text (written or oral).

3. The third approach was established in the sixties by the representatives of French semantic school (A. Grames, G. Curte, G. Lakan, M. Foucault) as “an alloy of Linguistics, Marxist ideology and Psychoanalysis” and was developed by German linguists: discourse is a crosss-point of many intercorrelated texts; as a whole of texts, which are thematically, culturally or anyhow connected and function within the certain communicative sphere and admit the development and supplementation by other texts.

So, the appearance of the theory of discourse led to the quantum leap in the development of language science and created one of the most complicated problems - a problem of the linguistic description of discourse. Having arisen in the course of linguistics of the text, the theory of discourse has never lost the primary connection with it, but it was consistently getting to the differentiation of the subject of research, to the delimitation of the concept “text” and “discourse” from the point of view of language realization, the relative length of the syntagmatic chain, and the formal-substantial parameters in the text of the coherent speech.

Such well-known linguists as G. Pocheptsov, R. Hodge, G. Kress and others believe that text and discourse can be considered by the analogy with a sentence and an utterance: “A sentence is a usual for us element of a structure. An utterance combines in itself both sentence and the social context of its usage. On the higher level the same relations are repeated in the text and discourse”. Drawing a parallel between the notions of “text-discourse” and “sentence-utterance” is heuristically convenient, though a kind of simplified analogy. Going further, it is necessary to point out that the definition of the utterance as “a sentence in the social context” grades the difference between the utterance and discourse, extremely expands its borders. On this basis, it is better to adhere to the traditional interpretation: “utterance = sentence + actual division + intonation”, regarding the context, after T. van Dijk, the determinant characteristic feature of discourse.

 From the point of view of Psycholinguistics text is a product of such kinds of speech activities as speaking, writing… the whole complex of psychological conditions of activity and individual-psychological peculiarities of the subject are objectified in text through an utterance.
  The notion of text as a product of the discourse activity allows to analyze text as a static phenomenon, the zone of power cancellation. Adaptation of the postulate of the quantum nature of a thought as the background for the science of intellect lets us speak about text as a product of discourse. Understanding text as a static immanently connected (and whole) product of discourse allows to determine it as any length succession of the linguistic markers, which is contained between two stops of communication. Such an approach draws the text closer to the utterance and ignores the difference, which is principal for the static analysis of language, between a written and an oral mode. The dynamic approach lets us answer the question, concerning the units of the research, which is significant for linguistics: text is the product of present discourse until the recipient initiates finishing communication.
 If text is the product of discourse activity, then its result, as it was said above, is the creation of such a communicative situation, which may be appreciated by a speaker and a listener as a successful one. And if to consider text as the product of discourse, the opposition of these two notions can be easily removed.
 The analysis of different approaches to the notion of discourse and the difference between the notions “discourse” and “text” shows that it is better to stick to the following definition: discourse is a coherent text combined with extralinguistic, pragmatic, socio-cultural, psychological and other factors, taken in the procedural aspect.
Reference Literature:

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