Mikhail Bakhtin's metalinguistics and its role in the study of speech representation

This article highlights the role of Mikhail Bakhtin in the study of speech representation. Bakhtin’s concepts are commonly applied as narratological theorems and are crucial in the research on verbal presentation of the narrative. Bakhtin contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of speech representation in verbal narrative. Contemporary narratology argues that the essence of speech representation consists of the interaction between two utterances, i.e. the narrator’s text and the character’s text. Bakhtin also drew attention to the plurality of narrative discourse in speech representation. He noted that language is both the object and the medium of representation. In Bakhtin’s works, the attention was directed to dialogical double-voicing in the verbal narrative. Bakhtin discovered a new branch of knowledge - “metalinguistics” - which allows to comprehend the processes of speech representation, the nature of the narrative discourse and the relationship between various discourses in text production. There are two important concepts to the study of the metalinguistic idea: “utterance as a unit of speech communication” and “heteroglossia”. In Bakhtin’s view, utterance as a unit of speech communication establishes boundaries in the stream of speech and serves to identify the subject of speech. In addition, “heteroglossia” embodies the interaction of the narrative discourse in verbal communication. According to Bakhtin, the novel as the leading prose genre determines the interaction between discourses that such dialogues produce. “Heteroglossia” is closely related not only to language interaction but also to the representation of consciousness in the verbal narrative.