Contact excursion: Speech genre vs communicative event
The article deals with the problem of the relationship between two linguistic theories: a speech genre theory and a speech act theory. The research is based on the genre of a contact excursion. From the point of view of genre studies a contact excursion is a speech genre and it can be described using the “speech genre questionnaire” proposed by T. V. Shmeleva, which includes the communicative goal of the genre, the concept of the author, the concept of the addressee, the dictum content, the image of the communicative past, the image of the communicative future, and the language embodiment. From the point of view of functional and structural classification, a contact excursion is a complex genre or a hypergenre, consisting of a number of simple genres. Within the framework of the actional or the activity approach, which is based on the speech act theory, a contact excursion can be considered as a communicative event and described using speech strategies and tactics which represent one or more speech actions, which traces to the concept of a speech act. The notion of the communicative style serves as the basis to reconcile and combine both theories.