Article

Name: Sphere of communication and discourse: terminological redundancy or the essential difference?

Authors: I. E. Kim, I. V. Silantev

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences Novosibirsk, Russian Federation; Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract: The paper discusses the relationship between the two terms used to denote similar phenomena in speech communication: the sphere of communication and the discourse. In Russian philology, the first term is used frequently in macro-sociolinguistics and general philology, and the other term is used in the discourse analysis. The ratio of both concepts with the most important concepts of speech communication – speech event, speech act and utterance has been revealed. The term sphere of communication is combined with the notion of speech genre (M. Bakhtin) and the concept of discourse with the same concept and the notion of the speech act, which is associated with the European philosophical and linguistic tradition. However, both terms are combined with the notion of utterance which is used in the Russian tradition by M. Bakhtin. The utterance has important qualities of informativity and intentionality. The main conclusion of the study is that the discourse and sphere of communication represent different communicative entities. Discourse is an open set of sentences, a type of speech practices that is limited with certain socio-cultural conditions of communication. Thus, the concept of discourse generalizes the utterance as a speech work, its communicative purpose and appropriate discursive tools. It means that the discourse is nothing more than direct speech practice limited by the type of the subject, the set of communicative goals, communicative strategies, and socio-cultural conditions. The sphere of communication is one of the socio-cultural conditions of speech, the area of life, which surrounds the communicative situation. The reasons for the communication and social limitations imposed by the sphere of communication constitute an invisible frame, where the Procrustean bed of communication is placed. They set the «rules of the game»». In addition, they influence the linguistic means used in such a way. The regular participation in a particular sphere of communication leads to the specialization of the language, for example to the formation of the functional style of the literary language. Thus, the sphere of communication and the discourse are fundamentally different communicative phenomena. Their similarity is the result of their function of generalization of the communicative situation and their probabilistic existence.

Keywords: linguistic notion, discourse, sphere of communication, utterance, speech event, speech genre, speech act

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