The Logical and Compositional Organization of the Lecture (Based on a Lecture from M. Mamardashvili’s Course “Lectures on Proust”)

Abstract

Functional and stylistic studies give us an idea of linguistic features of speech products, thus enabling style identification. These specific features become most recognizable when comparing styles. Discourse studies, on the contrary, are mainly focused on understanding and describing basic factors of creating a form of a literary language (style) and factors that determine the characteristics of speech products in individual situations within a socially significant sphere. This article presents an analysis of the logical and compositional organization of the lecture as a genre of academic discourse, taking a university lecture from M. Mamardashvili’s course on M. Proust as an example. The specific nature of the lecture genre in academic discourse is determined by its basic function in the teaching process implemented in direct dialogue with the audience. The research is based on the thesis that a lecture is an event that can be analysed using the concept of chronotope. The use of this concept beyond the analysis of fiction is relevant since spatiotemporal coordination is mandatory for any speech product, regardless of the sphere it is created in or the functions it performs. The main feature of the lecture chronotope is multi-level organization, since a lecture has its own internal spatiotemporal coordinates. The lecture chronotope is explicated at different levels of the text (compositional, lexical and grammatical), which are interconnected. Considering this, two interconnected frameworks of the lecture – structural and semantic – are singled out; they provide the logical and compositional organization of the material, which is important to ensure students’ understanding.