DISCOURSE AS AN OBJECT OF MODERN LINGUISTICS

Abstract

Discourse is one of the key concepts of the modern scientific paradigm of linguistic knowledge, based on the synthesis of cognition and communication and considered as a category that allows a new look at the text. The author analyzes various concepts of discourse that which were developed over the last decades within the cognitive, constructivist-poststructuralist, and neo-rhetorical approaches. Discourse in the cognitive approach is defined as a cognitive-communicative event, taken in its entirety, as a process, expression and product of interaction of communication participants, which occurs through a certain code in certain socio-cultural and historical conditions. Discourse in the constructivist-poststructuralist paradigm is considered as a certain cognitive-thematic space in which significant at this historical stage are formed ideological (semantic) positions, relevant to a particular society and those that are expressed not in one but in many scattered statements / texts that give the participants of communication certain subjective positions. Discourse in this sense should be referred to as a discourse formation. From the standpoint of neo-rhetoric, discourse can be defined as a strategy of creating and perceiving texts, a specific way of verbal perception of the world or a fragment of the world. This understanding of discourse most accurately reflects the term discursive practice. Despite being based on different methodological principles, the concepts analysed in a text have a common ground: they focus on the same research object, namely, the text. Monoand transtextual discourse models make it possible to transgress the limits of the text placing it within the dynamic space of communication. Discourse theory and the notion of discourse mark a new turn of the spiral of cognition that makes it possible to see and justify the cognitive and communicative potential of a text.