Lecture 1 Phonetics as a Linguistic Science Plan

3. Phonetics and Discourse

In its broadest sense, discourse can be viewed as speech activity in some communicative sphere. Discourse is often connected with specific means or rules of speech activity organization. N. D. Arutyunova defines discourse as a communicative act taken in all its structural, temporal, anthropological and modal aspects; it is speech as socially oriented activity influencing people's interaction and mechanisms of their consciousness (Арутюнова 1990).

Discourse can exist only in some real, physical time. It is "speech engrossed in life" (op.cit.).

Discourse investigation is at the forefront of interdisciplinary studies. Different types of discourses have been identified - academic or scientific discourse (lectures, seminars, tutorials, conferences, symposiums, etc.), ideopolitical discourse (speeches of statesmen, electoral campaigns, parliamentary debates, etc.), judicial, military discourse and others.

Linguistics explores discourse from various perspectives. Phonetics and phonology have much to do with recent approaches to the study of language-in-use and people's communication. Segmental and suprasegmental phenomena registered in different types of discourse are within the scope of the most urgent tasks of phoneticians and phonologists throughout the world. Phonetic data obtained in such studies elicit the solution of very important problems of applied character in the area of medicine, law and forensic science, artificial intellect and advanced technologies.

Most scholars oppose discourse to text, the latter being viewed as a fixed result or product of communication process, not rigidly adjusted to real time Лотман 1992). Text is "packed' communication that includes all elements of the communicative act as well as signals for their decoding. Discourse, unlike text, cannot accumulate information - it is only the means of information transmission and not the means of its accumulation and increase.

To "record" discourse is as impossible as to "record" a man's life. Indeed, to record all the instantaneous manifestations of discourse seems to be an unrealizable task.

In modern linguistics the term "text" and "discourse" are given different interpretations. For example Michael Stubbs in his book "Discourse Analysis " (1983) underlines the theoretical distinction between "written text versus spoken": the latter implies interactive discourse, whereas written text implies non-interactive monologue, whether intended to be spoken aloud or lot. Another distinction is that discourse implies length, whereas a text may be very short.

All the efforts of investigators working on discourse analysis are aimed at exploration of the features pertaining to different discourses in their variability. The accomplishment of this grandiose task could result in the creation of the inventory of different discourse elements as well as the ultimate discourse typology. The experimental data obtained by phonetics and pho-lology can play an important role in the solution of this fundamental problem of modern linguistics and related disciplines.