Communicative behavior in the structure of speech communication. The interdependence of the theory of speech behavior on the theory of speech acts.

According to E.M. Vereshagin and V. G. Kostomarov "culture is a product of social activity of social groups. It has the historical genesis and plays a decisive role in the formation of an individual human being." Being a part of culture, communicative culture is a product of social and communicative activities of members of a particular social group. Communicative culture is a set of communicative norms and traditions, operating under a specific national culture. The presence of the communicative culture provides the possibility of forming communicative competence and communicative behavior of certain members of this social group. Communicative culture organizes and standardizes the national intercourse [Верещагин, Костомаров 1990].

Communicative behavior is one of the components of national communicative culture. Communicative behavior is "the rules and traditions of communication of a cultural linguistic community, implemented in the process of communication." As a component of the national culture, the communicative behavior of the nation is directly dependent on it.

The study of communicative behavior of one nation can identify specific characteristics of national-cultural communication. This factor helps to find differences in the speech activity of different people. For a more detailed study of this phenomenon, it is necessary to consider the theory of speech activity.

Theory of speech activity, evolved from the basic theoretical propositions of psychological theory of speech activity, is the key to the understanding of speech communication. A.A. Leontyev is considered to be the creator of the modern theory of speech activity. He was the first to generalize, systematize and present in his works the whole concept of formation and understanding of verbal communication.

From his point of view, speech activity is a specific type of activity, not correlated directly with the "classical" activities such as work or play. Speech activity "in the form of individual speech acts serves all types of activities forming part of the labor, games, cognitive activities. Speech activity takes place only when the underlying motive, that encourages it, cannot be accomplished by any method other than speech" [Леонтьев 1969]. According to Leontyev, the distinctive features of speech activity are the following:

1) Subjective activity. It is determined by the fact, that the speech activity, according to A.A. Leontyev, takes "eye to eye approach to the world" [Леонтьев 1969].

2) Purposefulness, which means that any activity is characterized by an ultimate aim, and any action by an intermediate aim, the achievement of which is planned by the individual beforehand.

3) Motivation of speech activity. In reality, the act of any activity is encouraged by several motives, usually merged into one.

4) Hierarchical (vertical) organization of speech activity, including hierarchical organization of its units. A.A. Leontyev distinguished between the concept of macro-operation and micro-operation, and introduced the concept of three types of systemic activity.

5) Phasal ("horizontal") activity organization.

According to Leontyev, speech activity includes:

- Necessity, motive, purpose, directive, knowledge (cultural, linguistic);

- Multilateral analysis of the situation, in which activity should happen;

- The decision to perform or not to perform the activity and the choice of optimal means of activity realization for the given situation (forms of speech, their variants and the actual language means: phonetic, syntactic, lexical and other);

- planning of activity and prediction of its possible outcome;

- production (implementation) of the specific activities and operations;

- ongoing control of the activity in process and its correction (if necessary);

- comparison of the result of activity with its aim (intention).

In the process of social interaction the serving character of speech activity is clearly expressed. In this case speech is subject to some extra linguistic goals, aimed at organizing joint activities of people. This feature predetermines a more strict (as compared to interpersonal interaction) regulation of speech behavior. Although the norms of speech behavior are part of the sphere of tacit agreements between members of society, especially in the area of socially oriented communication the compliance with them is accompanied by a more stringent control.

In a pragmatic study of language they made a number of specific rules, implementation of which enables people to act together. The initial conditions are:

- The presence of at least a short-term immediate common goal among the participants of interaction. Even if their ultimate goals are different or contradict each other, there must always be the overall goal for the period of their interaction;

- The expectation that cooperation will continue for as long as both do not decide to terminate it. These conditions are called "the principle of cooperation", i.e. the requirement for interlocutors to act in a way that corresponds to accepted goals and direction of the conversation.

On the basis of this principle, the following basic rules of speech communication are distinguished:

1) The statement must contain exactly as much information as it is required for the current purposes of communication. Unnecessary information can sometimes be misleading, causing irrelevant issues and considerations, and the listener may be distracted by this extra information;

2) The statement must be truthful as much as possible. One must not say a lie. One must not say something for which there are no sufficient grounds;

3) The statement must be relevant, i.e. correspond to the subject.

4) The statement must be clear: it is necessary to avoid confusing expressions, ambiguity, unnecessary verbosity [Формановская 1982].

Speech strategies and tactics used by interlocutors are of great importance in the process of social interaction.

The strategy of verbal communication is the process of forming the communication aimed at achieving lasting results. The strategy includes the planning of speech interaction, depending on the specific conditions of communication and personalities of interlocutors, as well as the implementation of the plan, i.e. line of conversation. The aim of strategy is the winning of credibility, appeal to this or that action, cooperation, or refrains from any action.

Tactics of verbal communication is a set of methods of making a conversation and a line of conduct at a certain stage in a separate conversation. It includes specific methods to attract attention, establish and maintain contact with the partner and the impact on him, bringing him into a certain emotional state, etc [Стерин 2000].

The theory of speech activity is in close connection with the theory of speech acts.

The word collocation “the theory of speech acts” is used in the wide and narrow sense. In the first case it designates any complex of ideas directed on the explanation of speech activity, and is a synonym to “the theories of speech activity”. In the second case it acts as the name of one concrete theory which received a wide circulation abroad and has drawn attention of domestic scientists who developed the problems of speech communication both in the theoretical and applied aspect.

First of all the theory of speech acts is connected with the name of the philosopher of Oxford school Austin in his lectures, which he read at the Harvard University in 1955 and published in 1962 under the name “A Word As An Action” [Austin 1962:7].

He, for the first time, has drawn attention to the fact that pronouncing of an utterance can present not only the message of the information, but also the fulfillment of many other actions.

In the process of communication people not only build sentences but use them in order to make such actions as gratitude, request, order etc. In a typical case a speaker performs one or simultaneously some actions by pronouncing a sentence or some sentences. However, the speech act should not be confused with the sentence or the language expressions pronounced in the process of performing the speech act [Austin 1962:116].

Austin isolates three basic senses in which in saying something one is doing something, and hence three kinds of acts that are simultaneously preformed:

Locutionary act: the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference.

Illocutionary act: the making of a statement, offer, promise, apology etc. in uttering a sentence, by virtue of the conventional force associated with it.

Perlocutionary act: this is the influence, which the given utterance renders over the addressee. Not the fact of understanding the sense of the utterance by the addressee is meant, but those changes in the condition or behaviour of the addressee, which are the result of his understanding. The certain statement, or requirement, or reproach etc. can change a stock of knowledge of the addressee, can irritate or amuse him, force him to perform any act or refrain from actions planned earlier etc. The achievement of all these results is the examples of perlocutionary acts [Austin 1962:84].

Different illocutionary acts, for example surprise, have the aim to achieve a certain perlocutionary effect. However, in the theories of speech acts it is emphasized, that illocutionary act which represents the speech act itself should be distinguished from perlocutionary act, which can be and can be not achieved by the means of language. They distinguish auxiliary propositional acts, such as the indication to the object and the expression of certain proposition. This distinction between illocutionary act and propositional act is based on the fact that one and the same reference and the expression of the same proposition can take place in various illocutionary acts.

The illocutionary force is not necessarily expressed by explicit language means. The explicit expression of the illocutionary force is not limited by grammatical means.

The utterances that have illocutionary force are the utterances which Austin called performative utterances. The special feature of such utterances is that when we pronounce an utterance we perform an action. This coincidence of pronouncing with an action causes a lot of pragmatic, semantic and syntactic features [Austin 1962:27]:

1) A performative should satisfy the condition of sincerity of a speaker. It means, that the speaker should not pretend;

2) A performative cannot be true or false, it can only be successful or unsuccessful;

3) A verb of speech activity with the meaning of a question, a request, a statement and etc. is usually used as a performative;

4) A performative cannot include negative or modal words;

5) A performative is usually expressed in the present time, the first person, singular, and an indicative mood;

A performative is not an illocutionary act, but is closely connected with it. This due to the fact that one and the same illocutionary act can be expressions of various types [Austin 1962:31].

The characteristic “a word is business” is possible to apply to such utterances. An interesting feature of performative utterances can be derived from this – the absence of truth values.

They distinguish direct and indirect speech acts in the theory of speech acts. Searle was the first who made an attempt to distinguish indirect speech acts from direct speech acts. Using the concept of illocutionary force, he pays attention to the connection of communicative intention of speaker with the meaning of the utterance itself and the illocutionary effect, which is directed on the listener. If the speaker, pronouncing the sentence, means what he says the speech act will be direct. When one illocutionary act is performed by means of the fulfillment of another illocutionary act the speech act will be indirect [Searle 1979:31].

According to the illocutionary aim of the utterance and following from the semantic of English verbs, Austin singles out the following classes of speech acts:

- verdictives (sentence);

- commissives (promise, obligation);

- behabatives (congratulations, praise);

- expositives

Developing Austin’s idea, Searle proposed five components of speech acts. He puts forward 12 “significant measurements”, where the illocutionary purpose, the direction of adjustment and the condition of the sincerity, the expressed psychological condition are the basic ones. Searle’s classification includes 5 classes:

1) a representative – a speech act which describes states or represents events in the world, such as an ascertain, a claim, a report;

2) a directive – a speech act that has the function of getting the listener to do something, such as a request, a command, a suggestion;

3) a commissive – a speech act that commits the speaker to do something in the future, such as a promise or threat;

4) a declarative – a speech act that changes the state of affairs in the world;

5) an expressive – a speech act in which the speaker expresses feelings and attitudes about something, such as an apology, a complaint, gratitude, congratulation.

Bogdanov gives the list of the illocutionary acts, which are often used in different classifications [Богданов 1984:31]:

1) a declarative (constatives, representatives) – statements;

2) interrogatives– a question to the listener;

3) instructions – prompting the addressee to the action;

4) verdictives – verdicts of approval/disapproval;

5) promissives – promises;

6) permissives – permissions;

7) exersitives – abolition, limitation;

8) commissives – guarantees, obligations;

9) expositives – argument, objections;

10) satisfactives – gratitude, repentance.

As we see the situation of surprise refers to expressive utterance.

The language communication, which includes the idea about someone, who sends the message, and who accepts it, about the message itself and the reasons because of which this message was sent, is the means for comprehension of intentions, which a speaker wanted to carry out. We cannot understand the message if we are not able to reconstruct the intention laying in its basis which motivated the given act of utterance [Ferrara 1980:4].

Any utterance includes two aspects: 1) it is connected with the situation; 2) it is a product of subjective activity of a speaker and, having the communicative purpose and the informative importance, expresses his intentions. There are several classifications of pragmatical types of utterances in which linguists differently treat the definition of communicative and functional contents/character of the illocutionary type.

The connection of the communicative intention of a speaker with the meaning of the utterance and the illocutionary effect, which is directed on the listener, lies in the basis of Searle’s classification. The influence of the illocutionary effect forces the listener to accept the communicative intention of the speaker with the consequences, which are necessary for him. It is necessary to take into account the direction of the establishment of conformity between words and the real world, and also the expressed conditions of sincerity. Expressive utterances are singled out as a separate class, which expresses a mental condition, specific in a condition of sincerity, in relation to the state of affairs (situation), specific in the propositional contents.
Expressive utterances are such utterances which render mental condition of a speaker, his feelings, his attitude, to these or those events connected wither with the speaker itself, or with the listener, namely to events, happened in the past and in the present, and the emotionally colored condition of a speaker expressing the relations between the speaker and the listener, reflects the essence of these relations. Such utterances the speaker carries out with a kind of sensual expressiveness.

Searle’s paradigm of expressive verbs is as follows: to thank, to congratulate, to surprise, to regret. He pays attention to the fact that expressive are, probably, the unique class of utterances for which the direction of the establishment of conformity between words and the real world has no meaning. When analyzing the speech behavior of communicants, it is necessary to take into account their roles in the communicative act, and it is necessary to remember that the given actions of communicants are performed in view of norms and the rules of behavior accepted in the society, which regulate the speech activity in concrete speech situations.

According to I.M. Kobozeva, the close "interdependence" of the theory of speech acts and the theory of speech activity is due to the fact that the word-collocation «the theory of speech acts" in its broadest sense refers to any set of ideas aimed at explaining speech activity, and is synonymous to "theory of speech activity”. In a narrow sense, it serves as the term for a particular theory (cf. speech act theory, theory of speech acts).

Finally, the theory of communicative behavior reveals the features of a cultural linguistic community. The study of communicative behavior of a nation will identify national and cultural specificity of verbal communication, which in fact distinguishes the verbal communication of different nations.

The founder of the theory of communicative behavior is Russian scientist I.A. Sternin, who was the first to propose a unique model for describing this phenomenon. According to the scientist, the communicative behavior of a community has not yet been presented in a systematic description. "This is due, firstly to the underdevelopment of theory and methodology of such a description, and, secondly, that it is still unclear, the representatives of what science should do it. Communicative behavior seems to be a synthetic philological and socio-anthropological science of the future. Description of any language as a cultural-historical phenomenon involves the description of communicative behavior as its integral part” [Стернин 1989:101].

Communicative behavior is characterized by certain norms. They distinguish common cultural, situational and individual norms. The general cultural norms of communicative behavior are typical to the whole cultural linguistic community and largely reflect the accepted rules of etiquette. They relate to the situations of the general plan, between people in general, regardless of the scope of communication, age, status, type of activities.

Within a certain culture, communicative behavior is governed by a set of linguistic and social norms. Linguistic norms are the demands made on communicants by the system of the language in which the communication is carried out. Social norms are specific behavioral recommendations to which an individual, who is a member of this social group, should rely. It should be noted that there is no single rule for all cases of communication. The whole system of rules emerges in a society. That is why, depending on the compliance or non-compliance with generally accepted social norms of the group, one can talk about the appropriate or inappropriate communicative behavior.

If the generalization is limited to the subject in discussion or composition of interlocutors, one should consider the notion of situational norms. Situational norms come into effect when the communication is not standardized, but the external circumstances affect the communication. Thus, in every culture there are rules governing the communication of the communicants with unequal social status. These rules in most cases differ from the rules governing the communication of the communicants with equal social status. Vertical communicative behavior suggests the opposition: superior-inferior, the horizontal: equal - equal. For example, communication between a man and woman in the Russian culture appears as a horizontal and in Muslim as the vertical. Apart from the norms of the vertical and horizontal communication, the situational norms include age norms, norms of professional, family, male, female, formal, informal communicative behavior, etc.

Finally, the individual norms are designed to reflect the communicative experience of the individual; they constitute the individual refraction of general cultural and situational norms of communication in the language of personality ".

Norms of all three levels, not only determine the behavior of members of this social group, but also form certain requirements for the behavior of other members of this social group by the informants. An important characteristic of communicative norms is their national specificity.

The model of communicative behavior includes such components as 1) the national character of interlocutors, 2) the dominant features of communication, 3) verbal communicative behavior, 4) non-verbal communicative behavior, 5) national social symbolism [Стернин 1996].

Description of the model of communicative behavior is not limited only by the description of its components. Communicative behavior is also a component of national culture. The communicative behavior is also characterized by national-cultural specificity. "The impact of culture on language manifests itself in the originality of the process of communication in different cultures, which affects some features of lexis and grammar and style of a language. In every culture, human behavior is regulated by the generally accepted ideas about what a man is supposed to do in typical situations: the behavior of pedestrians, passengers, doctor, etc. In social psychology such models, or patterns of behavior, are called social roles of personality" [Мечковская 2000].

In conclusion, it should be stressed that although communicative behavior is closely related to speech etiquette, it is "a broader concept" than the speech etiquette. Communicative behavior describes real communicative situations in general, and the speech etiquette is associated with standard formulas of speech in the standard speech communication situations that reflect the category of politeness. According to these definitions, it is clear that the communicative behavior includes verbal etiquette as an integral part of it [Стернин 2000б:10].