Speakers take the trouble to speak/write only in order to effect an imaginary communicative state of the addressee and provoke changes in it. Therefore, the sense and meaning of what is happening at the time of the natural communicative procedure (that is, what the speakers/writers produce) can be understood only in direct connection with the planned impact of someone. Since the action cannot be realized without the subject of the action, any verbal data if not involved in the concrete communicative procedure, turn out to be artificial, unnatural. They can not produce communicative sense and have meanings, because they do not have a speaker, which is the only source of communicative intention, thoughts, emotions etc. That is why language cannot produce sense, its forms cannot be something identical in itself: in the language there is no a speaker, which could assign objects, form connections, select the addressee, etc., in order to produce an effective semiotic act.

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In the paper on the basis of observations over the group of examinees viewing W. Chafe’s movie “The boy abducting pears”[1] a number of statements significant for understanding the sense-production process in a communicative action (including verbal) is presented[2]: 1) Natural verbal process represents one of communication modes; 2) what is carried out in natural speaking process is not the “exchanging of senses (meanings) by words”; what is made is a communicative influence (with participation of the verbal channel); 3) a thought and a communicative (including verbal) action are essentially differ among themselves based on the factor of actionality; 4) the sense-generating process in verbal act is directly connected with actional character of any semiotic act. The sense (and the aim) of generating verbal act (as well as acts by means of other communicative channels) is imaginable influence; 5) interpretation of sense-generation in a semiotics act represents understanding what the author of an act consciously does; 6) the sign or the sequence of signs can signify (be interpreted) only as a part of a individual semiotic procedure; 7) what is analyzed and realized as a “context” for the sign represents a multiple-factor situation of communication in which the main predicating element is the semiotic action of a communicant; 8) communicants generate and understand complex multiple-factor communicative actions, but not signs of a language; 9) communicative (semiotic) and not communicative actions are understood by means of interiorizing a cognitive state of the one who makes a semiotic action.

 

Keywords: natural verbal process, communicative model, parameters of semiotic act, sense-production, semiotic act, communicative and not-communicative action, sign, cognitive status, pears stories, interpretation

 

[1] Chafe W. The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production. Norwood: 1980.

[2] Vdovichenko A. “Hey, wait, here is your hat”: what is generated and understood in natural communicative process, Journal of Psycholinguistics, Moscow 2018 (in print).