“The speaker’s speech will is manifested primarily in the choice of particular speech genre. This choice is determined by the specific nature of the given sphere of speech communication, semantic (thematic) consideration, the concrete situations of the speech communication, the personal composition of its participants, and so on. And when the speaker’s speech plan with all its individuality and subjectivity is applied and adapted to a chosen genre, it is shaped and developed within a certain generic form” (78). “These genres are so diverse because they differ depending on the situation, social position, and personal interrelations of the participants in the communication…These genres also require a certain tone; their structure includes a certain expressive intonation” (79). “Genres correspond to typical situations of speech communication, typical themes, and, consequently, also to particular contacts between the meanings of words and actual concrete reality under certain typical circumstances” (87).
“We are given these speech genres in almost the same way that we are given our native language, which we master fluently long before we being to study grammar” (78). “Many people who have an excellent command of a language often feel quite helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a practical command of the generic forms used in the given spheres…The better our command of genres, the more freely e employ them, the more fully and clearly we real our own individuality in them (where it is possible and necessary), the more flexibility and precisely e reflect the unrepeatable situation of communication – in a work, the more perfectly we implement our speech plan” (80).
“We learn to cast our speech in generic forms and, when hearing others’ speech, we guess its genre from the very first words; we predict a certain length (that is, the approximate length of the speech whole) and a certain compositional structure; we foresee the end; that is, from the beginning we have a sense of the speech whole, which is only later differentiated during the speech process” (79).
The second main idea is that Bakhtin criticizes linguistics for believing that a sentence can be studied outside of the context of the speech situation and that the listener is passive.
“The fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning…of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either aggress or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on….Sooner or later what is heard and actively understood will find its response in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener” (68-9). At the same time, the speaker “does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone else’s mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth…Moreover, any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree…[H]e presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances – his own and others’ – with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another…Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances” (69).
“One exchange utterance that are constructed from language units: words, phrases, and sentences. And an utterance can be constructed both from one sentence and from one word, so to speak, from one speech unit…but this does not transform a language unit into a unit of speech communication” (75). When we select a particular type of sentence, we do so not for the sentence itself; but out of consideration for what we wish to express with this one given sentences…The idea of the form of the whole utterance, that is, of a particular speech genre, guides us in the process of our speaking” (81).
“Each speech genre in each area of speech communication has its own typical conception of the address, and this defines it as a genre…When constructing my utterance, I try actively to determine this response. Moreover, I try to act in accordance with the response I anticipate, so this anticipated response, in turn, exerts an active influence on my utterance” (95).
Key Terms
- Speech genre: “the “relatively stable types of” utterances in a language (60). Speech genres are written and oral.
- Utterance: “Speech is always cast in the form of an utterance belonging to a particular speaking subject, and outside this form it cannot exist…The boundaries of each concrete utterance as a unit of speech communication are determined by a change of speaking subjects, that is, a change of speakers” (71).