Реч и речезнание – предмет и опит за описание на науката
Speech and Speech Science – Subject Matter and Scientific Description

Summary/Abstract: Speech as a gift of nature acquired by homo sapiens (‘wise man’ in Latin) in the process of communicative interaction is an indisputable phenomenon of paramount importance, which in turn justifies the interest of scientists in this type of homo loquens’ (speaking man) activity as a behavioral manifestation of personality. Oral speech offers a vast amount of information for describing communication since it signals discrete sequences of ‘digital’ information on the one hand, while providing additional ‘analogue’ information about the speaking person, on the other. This means that everyday speech in its real use contains speech features related to various speakers who take part in the process of communication. Speech is the material substance which explicates the concrete representation of discourse as it happens in real time, and exists as discourse special dimension in relation to human mind. Human speech can be characterised as a complex set of elements of prosody, which could be divided into the following main groups related to the sound and its time, pitch, force and timbre. The acoustic and per-ceptualauditory continuity of speech has become a cornerstone for describing the process of speech in time when solving many practical tasks, since the sounding oral message represents a continuous flow of air waves separated by pauses. The wave-like nature of speech makes it possible to recognise in the structure of the spoken message simultaneous components, just like in a musical cord one can recognise the simultaneous tones of which it is composed. Therefore, the task of developing a special separate research area, called speech science, becomes logical and necessary.

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