Socio-psychological context of ontogeny of discourse

The article examines the ontogeny of discourse as an important component in a person's developmental activity. This process is viewed in the wide socio-psychological context relating communication and subject activity, dating back to research on instruments and signs by L.S. Vygotsky, A.N. Leontiev and P.Ya. Galperin. In the author's opinion, such a relationship is an integral characteristic of joint activity that acts, depending on the tasks to be accomplished, as either subject-instrumental or sign-oriented. In this way, as a foundation of any discourse, the author proposes considering the psychological capabilities of a person, acquired in the course of mastering means of activity, where the stages of discourse ontogeny act as the developmental stages of an individual's consciousness. It is emphasized that the division of discourse into types, as accepted in linguistics, differs from the psychologist's view of discourse in terms of its superficiality, for it relies upon the frequency of use of certain words rather than the reasons and meanings expressed by the communicant. Analogously, linguistic identity means not only the range of a person's capabilities connected with the creation and reception of speech (text) production, but also with the capability of understanding that which is concealed behind the word. The author considers the essence of the problem of interrelating communication and subject transformations in joint activity. Accordingly, the role of various forms of consciousness is considered, in particular, the cognitive and communicative as they relate to everyday consciousness. The specifics of special forms of joint activity in ontogeny and phylogeny are identified. Particular attention is paid to the whole complex of so-called linguistic and paralinguistic means of communication used by communicants for actualizing the communicative consciousness of subject meanings as results of joint activity. Analysis of the variety of forms of consciousness has led to a conclusion that the problem of understanding is the problem of forming means of understanding that must be appropriate to the conditions and results of joint activity.

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