The limits of naive discourse: statement of the problem

The article deals with the limits of the term «naive discourse». A brief background on this term showed that its limits had been expanded: at first, the term was used to describe texts written by ordinary people for private purposes - diaries, letters, memoirs etc., as well as casual conversations. But with the development of the Internet and emergence of various social networks, forums and so on, this term began to be used also as applied to texts written by the users of the Internet for public access. Purpose. To describe the peculiarities of naive discourse compared to other types of discourse, explain why it is difficult to give a strict definition of the term and propose several options of defining it, pointing out their advantages and disadvantages. Results. The analysis of the existing definitions of the term «naive discourse» revealed that, according to the scholars, the main parameter of this type of discourse is the absence of special education and experience in a particular field of professional activity of the sender and/or the recipient of the communication. This parameter was used to formulate the following working definition of the term: naive discourse is a totality of oral and written texts created by people whose profession is not connected with composing texts and/or people who are not specialists in the sphere which their texts deal with. However, the analysis of different texts showed that there is also a gray area between naive and professional journalistic discourse or other type of discourse: some texts combine the traits of two different types of discourse. Thus, it was demonstrated that a new definition based on other parameters needs to be provided. Several options of defining this term were given in the article. One of them is to single out the gray area of discourse. Yet in this case this type of discourse will contain texts which differ greatly, and that is why this gray area will need a detailed description of all the types of discourse which are included in it. Another option is to use a scale of discourses, but it will lead to the necessity of creating more terms, such as «semi-naive», «semi-professional» and other intermediate types of discourse. One more possible variant is to come back to the former limits of the term «naive discourse» and use the term «Internet discourse» or «online discourse» along with it. However, in this case some texts closely approximated to each other (for instance, customer reviews in books of complaints and suggestions and on special web sites) will have to be classified as representations of different types of discourse, whereas other texts which are far cry from each other will be in the same group because of the formal criterion - their existence in the Internet. To sum up, the difficulty of giving a strict definition is connected with the two problems: on the one hand, scholars have intention to oppose naive discourse, which now includes not only everyday conversations and private letters, diaries and other handwritten texts, to other types of discourse as this term is useful for describing different traits of natural speech, which is not as limited by different norms and rules as texts of scientific, journalistic and other types of discourse. On the other hand, topics and forms of existence of naive discourse are so multifarious that it is extremely difficult to oppose naive discourse in all its diversity to other types of discourse. Conclusion. Scholars are suggested to be flexible in defining their material as naive or non-naive discourse and are advised to make their own decisions about whether the text under their investigation can be considered as a representation of naive discourse or not. Naive discourse is described as a superclass above other types of discourse. It is characterized by a lower degree of codification and less limitations of genre, stylistics, etiquette and other rules and restrictions, which play an important role for the corresponding types of non-naive discourse.