Speech

The most important achievement of a person that allowed him to use universal experience, both past and present, was verbal communication, which developed on the basis of labor activity. Speech is a language in action. Language is a system of signs , including words with their meanings plus syntax - a set of rules by which sentences are built. The word is a kind of sign, since the latter are present in various kinds of formalized languages. The objective property of the verbal sign that determines the theoretical activity is the meaning of the word, which is the ratio of the sign (the word in this case) to the object denoted in reality in an abstract way from how it is represented in the individual consciousness.

In contrast to the meaning of the word, personal meaning is a reflection in the consciousness of the place that a given object occupies in the system of activity of a particular person. If the value combines the socially significant features of the word, then the personal meaning is the subjective experience of its content.

The following main functions of the language are distinguished:

• means of subsistence, transmission and assimilation of socio-historical experience
• means of communication (communication)

Performing the first function, the language serves as a means of encoding information about the studied properties of objects and phenomena. Through language, information about the world and man himself, received by previous generations, becomes the property of subsequent generations. Performing the function of a means of communication, language allows you to influence the person you are talking to directly (if we directly indicate what needs to be done) or indirectly (if we give him information that is important for his activity, which he will focus on immediately or at another time in the appropriate situations).

The development, change in the lexical composition of a language, its grammatical and sound (see also the sound of speech , phoneme ) system is possible only with the continuous reproduction of language structures in live speech. The lack of verbal communication leads to the death of the language or, in the presence of a sufficient number of written documents, to its conservation at a certain level of development, as in the case of Latin and Ancient Greek . At the same time, the grammatical structure of the language remains unchanged, the vocabulary does not reflect the changes occurring in the surrounding world and human activity, and the phonetic system can only be theoretically reconstructed on the basis of the “descendant” languages.

The following language features are also distinguished:

• Lexical
• Denoting
• Regulatory
• Communicative

Speech is an essential element of human activity that allows a person to know the world around him, to transfer his knowledge and experience to other people, to accumulate them for transmission to future generations.

As a means of expressing thoughts, speech, in the course of its development in ontogenesis , becomes the main (but not the only) mechanism of human thinking . Higher, abstract thinking is impossible without speech activity.

IP Pavlov noted that only speech activity gives a person the opportunity to distract from reality and generalization, which is a distinctive feature of human thinking.

Depending on the form of communication, speech activity is divided into oral (implying speaking and listening ) and written ( writing and reading ).

In the course of "productive" types of speech activity - speaking and writing - the following groups of mental and physiological mechanisms are involved:

• mechanism for programming a speech utterance (transmitted meaning);
• a group of mechanisms related to the construction of the grammatical structure of the utterance, the search for the right words according to semantic features, the choice of a particular sound (in spoken language , see speech sound , phoneme ) or graphic system (in written language, see grapheme , letter ); According to modern research, the fulfillment of these functions is localized in the central nervous system mainly in the temporal cortex, called the Broca Zone (Broadman's Zone 45), which was one of the last stages of human evolution.
• physiological mechanisms that ensure the actual implementation of speech utterances (the physical process of "speaking" or "writing").

The rules of language construction have ethnospecific features that are expressed in the system of phonetic, lexical, grammatical and stylistic means and rules of communication in a given language. Speech is closely integrated with all human mental processes. The linguistic side of human speech behavior is studied by psycholinguistics .

Speech Properties:

1. The content of speech is the number of thoughts, feelings and aspirations expressed in it, their significance and relevance to reality;
2. The intelligibility of speech is the syntactically correct construction of sentences, as well as the application of pauses or highlighting words with the help of logical stress in appropriate places;
3. The expressiveness of speech is its emotional richness, the richness of language means, their diversity. In its expressiveness, it can be bright, energetic and, conversely, lethargic, poor;
4. The effectiveness of speech is a property of speech, which consists in its influence on the thoughts, feelings and will of others, on their beliefs and behavior.

Speech is divided into internal and external. External types of speech are divided into dialogic and colloquial.

Speech (articulate speech) appeared during the evolution of man between 1.7−2 million years ago, in the first homo - it was at this time that the speech apparatus was formed. According to anthropology, the main sign of the presence of the vocal apparatus in a fossil individual is the styloid process of the temporal bone, it is rarely present in skulls of ardipithecus and is found in almost all skulls of early homo . Speech is determined not only by the styloid process, but also by it, and it is easily identified in fossil remains ^[1] .

• Oral speech
• Oral - Written
• Articulating apparatus
• Speech therapy
• Logorea
• Speech recognition
• Phone conversation
• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuro-linguistics

• Speech // Big Russian Encyclopedia. Volume 28. - M. , 2015 .-- S. 456-458.
• Vygotsky L. S. Thinking and Speech / Edited and with an introductory article by V. Kolbakovsky. - M .: State Socio-Economic Publishing House, 1934. - 326 p. - 10,000 copies.
• Zhinkin N.I. Speech as a conductor of information. - M .: Nauka, 1982. - 159 p. - 6000 copies.
• Nikolaev A. I. The meaning of the concepts of “speech” and “language” in the literature // Fundamentals of literary criticism / study guide for students of philological specialties. - Ivanovo: LISTOS, 2011 .-- 255 p.