Evaluating parameters of the present-day public discourse linguistic correctness and communicative efficiency

The article studies in linguo-philosophical and linguo-communicative angles the problem of speech ecology in the conditions of the present-day society along with the violations, caused by it, of linguistic and communicative norms of cooperative speech intercourse. Proceeding from the language-as-a-doer conception and also from the fact of limited linguistic censorship in the sphere of present-day mass communication, the author justifies possibility of all kinds of irregularities in public discourse and analyses how their appearance can affect the eventual communicative efficiency of the discourse as a whole. The article gives a chronological observation of the practice of discourse analysis acquiring the four basic criteria of evaluating linguistic utterances - grammaticality, acceptability, truth, and reference - which were gradually introduced in linguistics as the result of influence from adjacent areas of knowledge. On the basis of selected examples the author tries to find out whether appliance of these speech evaluation methods is justified inasmuch as they help to evaluate linguistic conventions implementation and ability of speech utterances to transmit communicator’s intentions implicated in them. Having studied different kinds of speech deviations violating, to this or that extant, the norms of grammar, syntax, conceptualization processes, and communication canons, the author comes to the conclusion that violations of norms do not always cause ultimate communicative failures. According to the author, verbal communication can only be estimated as unsuccessful when it fails to receive adequate perception on the part of the addressee. Based on that, the conclusion is made that while evaluating discourse linguistic correctness and pragmatic consistency, one should, first of all, consider peculiarities of the extra-linguistic context and the category of the receptive audience rather than whether the discourse does or does not conform to the norms of usage and standard speech ethics.