Філологічні науки/7

Язык, речь, речевая коммуникация

Valery U. Berezhnaya

Donbas State Technical University

Some Aspects of Applied Psycholinguistics

The study of the language is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It becomes a tangle begetting multiple language discrepancies. That is why linguistics compares languages and explores their histories, in order to find and to account for its development and origins to give the answers to this or that language point. In its tern, linguistics engendered three new approaches to language study: these are sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics and psycholinguistics.

Psycholinguistics analyses peculiar properties of the causing and sensing language mechanisms on the grounds of speech activity functioning in the society and personal maturity. In this case, psycholinguistics transforms into psychosemantics.

One issue is indeed properly seen as "hardware" technique, namely the physical recording of visible and audible information that constitute the display modalities of conversational behavior. However, when faced with a videotape of a conversational exchange one does not, as an investigator, escape any of the software problems of transcription and analysis that one was faced with the audiotape. If anything, the investigator's task becomes more technically complex, requiring more complex notation systems for their analysis. Thus, what a psycholinguist came to realize was that the technical limitation imposed by the available notation system was equally, if not more crucial than the physical recording. While the latter was improving by an order of magnitude, the "software" notation difficulties imposed limiting factors on the power of analysis. The study of talk is not currently being retarded by technical hardware, but rather by the unavailability of a full-blown notation system methodology. This situation is analogous to the case of linguistics, which prior to the formalism of generative grammar, did not have a notation system for referring to linguistic phenomena; instead, there existed a notation system called "the tree structure," which was made of elements that were fixed in number, and hence, taxonomically available. This research, as it rapidly and very successfully evolved during its first two decades, centers around issues that are called notational; this means that the investigator proposes various specific representations of linguistic phenomena and then examines their empirical validity by finding corresponding facts in sentences, phrases, and relations between them. The study of talk also needs an empirical notation system that would allow theoretical objects and processes to be validated against visible facts. This much is no doubt agreed upon by all. But now, the alternative to the current trend in the study of conversation as social behavior contains the notion that a transcript is not an incomplete record but rather a theory specifying a notation system. This definition would thus relegate the purely technical issues of physical recording to another arena, perhaps the applied arena of "interpretive evidence" as practiced in legal and literary investigations of just what did happen? For such purposes, it is clear that technical improvements in the recording of data is a key factor. However, it must be recognized that even such purely applied issues would benefit from a more general, less particularistic, methodology for investigating the basic phenomena of talk, as they manifest in their visible features. This issue is the notational issue in the study of talk. The concept of topic nominal illustrates some of the issues that are to be empirically investigated in the continued improvement of notational solutions to the problem of representing and identifying the facts of talk. In other words, the notational solutions in the form of Rules or Procedures for transforming data about talk constitute explanations of visible information. For example, the common practice of writing down spoken utterances makes use of a functional notation system that insures a demonstrable correspondence between what witnesses can hear auditorily and what they can read visually. This correspondence is a functional identity; the written version is not seen as a degraded form of the spoken, but rather a representative of it. This ambassadorial function is full ledged: thus, if we need to know the time, we can rely equally well on a person's writing it down for us as saying it out loud, perhaps even more. Of course, if we had to know the tone of voice or style of delivery or momentary situational factors of an implied nature, we would be helped perhaps even in crucial ways by the availability of such additional information. Undoubtedly, the nature of talk allows great leeway, i.e., works within very broad informational limits. In other words, it is part of ordinary behavioral competence on the daily round to reintegrate and to reconstruct situations on the basis of data that are fragmentary and fragmentary to an unknown extent. Thus, a transcript or notational transcription of discourse is fragmentary rather than incomplete or degraded. Thus, it became clear that the search need not be hampered by fragmentary records of conversational behavior. This realization also told us of a basic feature of conversational phenomena; namely, that they ordinarily and naturally get transformed as they occur. In other words, conversation is a performative or presentational phenomenon. This means that the facts to be recorded and represented (i.e., notational issues), lie in strictly derivative considerations rather than being interpretive. In other words, what counts in a conversation is not so much what physically happened as what happened to be noticed! In still other words, the noticeability of conversational events is the likely arena for finding the explanations for the observed behaviors rather than in the arena of physical recordings. In fact, it is theoretically possible to devise a purely notational system usable by a single investigator to record symbolically the interesting features of any transactional exchange - a theoretical position that justifies the existence of engineering. In day-to-day practice, such things as notes, instructions, and letters, can simulate such a notation system, though the simulation is quickly uncovered when a foreigner or non-regular is interposed as a medium; one discovers then that much more is implicit and understood through "background information" than can be stated. Needed, then, is a notation system that is sufficiently sensitive to precisely those second-order facts that are not on the audio- or video-tape. They are called derivative facts and are obtained through a process of formal transformation of data.