Екзаменаційний білет № 7

1. Linguistic units and their peculiarities.

2. The utterance. Communicative and pragmatic types of utterances.

3. Do the task from the card.

In fact, the word is considered to be the central (but not the only) linguistic unit of language' Linguistic units (or in other words - signs) can go into three types of relations:

a) The relation between a unit and an object in the world around us (objective reality). - refers to a definite piece of furniture. It may be not only an object but a process, state, quality, etc..

This type of meaning is called referential meaning of a unit. It is semantics that studies the referential meaning of units. b) The relation between a unit and other units (inner relations between units). No unit can be used independently; it serves as an element in the system of other units. This kind of meaning is called syntactic. Formal relation of units to one another is studied by syntactics (or syntax). c) The relation between a unit and a person who uses it. As we know too well, when we are saying something, we usually have some purpose in mind. We use the language as an instrument for our purpose (e.g.). One and the same word or sentence may acquire different meanings in communication. This type of meaning is called pragmatic. The study of the relationship between linguistic units and the users of those units is done by pragmatics.

The communicative and pragmatic types of utterances and the aims of those utterances were defined as the starting point for investigating the process of monologue speech acts production. These acts contain individual meanings and a semantic structure. More concretely, the production process may be viewed as follows: All information in the course of communication is transformed into a system. The elements of the system are the objective meanings of linguistic and kinetic units employed by a speaker and also the subjective meanings of a speaker and the subjective meanings of a listener.

The behavioural act, both its verbal and nonverbal parts, is performed with a definite aim, which forms a holistic meaning. In the course of the production process there is a semantic structure (the meaning of the sentence) as input, and there is also a certain pragmatic performance (the meaning of an utterance) as output. While perceiving the communicative act the listener engages in a reverse process: 1) the input is a pragmatic performance; 2) the output a semantic structure (for details, see Semenenko 1996). The goal of carrying out a communicative act is an indispensable part of a pragmatic performance and, significantly, pragmatic performance is correlated with some elements of a semantic structure. Furthermore, in a monologue situation, communicative and intentional aspects of the utterance (illocutionary and other intentions) interact with a speaker's intention to adjust dialogically-oriented utterance semantics to the conditions of a monologue situation.

Thus, the pragmatic performance, based on a semantic structure, includes different objectives: 1) the communicative act; 2) the utterance proper; 3) the monologue adjustment. The most important fact is that all those objectives are expressed through various means, prosodic and kinetic being among them. This suggests that study of gesture-speech interaction should proceed, on the one hand, from the expression of the objectives in a speech act in general, and on the other hand, from speech-gesture realisations in particular, which can prove their deep links on a cognitive level. I shall dwell upon the expression of different objectives in a speech act, which are conveyed through the speech act constituents.

All three components of our study, namely, a prosodic nucleus, a kinetic gesture and an utterance proper, possess a form (morphology), a meaning (semantics), syntagmatics and paradigmatics and pragmatics. Accordingly, the following meanings can be distinguished:

1. significative - the relationship of the element to the meaning and communicative essence of an utterance;

2. syntagmatic - the syntagmatic relations between elements and their functions in speech; pragmatic meaning also belongs here, that is, the impact the elements have on a listener and the relationship of a speaker towards the sign;

3. paradigmatic - the contraposition of semantically homogeneous elements to other elements of the same class on the same paradigmatic axis;

4. sigmatic - the relationship of the elements to the situation, and the actualisation of a meaning in a particular situation.