DISCOURSE AS A SOCIO-LINGUAL PHENOMENON

Abstract

The study of general laws of communication of people through natural language, the organization of language code, various components of communication occurs within the framework of discourse theory. In modern humanities, the concept of discourse is widely and fruitfully used. However, the meaning of this term is variable, determined not only by the field of humanitarian knowledge, the goals and objectives of the researchers, but also by a rather ambiguous and vague understanding of the discourse in linguistics to which it has direct competence. The situation is almost the same as defining the concept of language: each linguist intuitively presents its content, but nevertheless there is no single interpretation of it, which determines the desire of linguists in review and analytical articles in one way or another to outline this phenomenon.

This article is devoted to the study of the concept of “discourse”, highlights the main approaches to understanding the term, discusses the difference between the concepts of “discourse” and “text”, as well as presents one of the main possible typologies of discourse on the basis of representativeness.

The multidimensional nature of the content and forms of discourse, in particular, led to the diversity of its theoretical definitions and the rapid evolution of its concepts, even within the same scientific direction. Today, the scope of the term “discourse” is broad (philosophy, sociology, logic, semiotics, communication theory, linguistics, etc.; their separate areas are pragmalinguistics, pragmastilistics, linguistic semantics, grammatical stylistics, linguistic stylistics, linguistics also interdisciplinary sciences – psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, etc.), which has to be said about the polysemy of this terminological unit. Moreover, we can trace its distribution both horizontally, that is, in different sciences, and vertically, that is, at different levels of linguistics itself.

The subject of our study is discourse, peculiarities of its origin and variability (on the example of the newspaper discourse of Ukrainian modernity). The article focuses on newspaper texts, first of all – on newspaper articles.

Analyzing the forms and expression of newspaper discourse, we proceeded from the assumption that its material embodiment are newspaper texts devoted to politics, declamatory speeches, magazines, leaflets, radio, television, advertising, literary criticism , reviews, analytical reviews, social portraits, scientific political science articles, that is, those materials in which political research is explored from the scientific point of view.