Utterance as the initial linguistic sign: cognitive discoursive rationale

Abstract

In this article, the author applies the hypothetical-deductive method to determine the status of the utterance as the basic linguistic sign. Inconsistent interpretation of language units - words or sentences - as linguistic signs is proven, and the contradictions of the two dominant theories of the linguistic sign in traditional linguistics are revealed. Such methodological reflection prioritizes the cognitive discoursive approach. The article points out that the units of language - words and sentences are "taken" forms of human activity. It notes that, like other signs, the linguistic sign is characterized by a double signification with both an "object" meaning and a "sign" meaning. The article emphasizes that modern semiotic studies reject the substantial interpretation of the sign meaning, describing communicativeness as its fundamental feature. This feature of signs, including linguistic ones, in the past, stimulated linguists to abandon an understanding of the word as the main linguistic sign and to define the sentence as "a complex sign". However, the fundamental dialogical nature of language and the background assumption of modern cognitive linguistics of the joint activity of communicants in interpreting the semantics of linguistic expression, as well as the discoursive determining of any linguistic expression, make it possible to assert that the true linguistic sign is an actual utterance based primarily on various types of a sentence as units of the language system and acting as a "territory of interaction" for participants of communication