Destructive Changes in the Structure of Speech Action

Abstract

This article considers the destructive changes in speech action, which are diagnosed by a comparative analysis of associative fields over time, and addresses two central problems: refinement of the long-standing concept of “speech action” and optimization of the established procedure for analyzing numerous and diverse associative data. The dynamics of the ways of predicating speech actions based on the material of associative fields was investigated. The principles of interpreting the cue, the target combination as a speech action, were further elaborated. The analysis relies on the results of free associative experiments and speech action modeling. The findings reveal a drastic change in the universal process of speech production over the past 27–30 years, with a significant decrease in the number of speech actions within the full syntactic cycle and a growing use of topic–comment structures and syntactic primitives as the types of speech action. The study is of great importance for psycholinguistics and associative lexicography, as it introduces a method for analyzing the associates indicative of the dynamics of language ability. In addition, the theoretical problem of classification of thematic or agrammatic responses as speech actions with a skipped operation of surface syntaxing was solved.