R.K. Potapova

In this paper a brief description of the semiotic conception is given regarding the interpersonal and intercultural speech communication. The speech activity generally includes verbal, paraverbal and extraverbal aspects of communication that form heterogeneous «bundles» of spoken language features. However, when real-time (on-line) spoken language communication is concerned, it is very difficult and almost impossible to divide this phenomenon into distinct parts. The combinations of different features form character shapes allowing to decode the semantics and pragmatics of a spoken language utterance and also its modality and emotional content. These phenomena constitute one of the objects of research of the speech science (speechology), a cross-disciplinary scientific domain which comprises various aspects of speech activity (public speaking, speech training, speech disorders, and pathology, phonetic and acoustic representations of language, psychological and physical characteristics of the speaker, development of speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion systems, language and speaker identification etc.). The semiotic macrosystem comprises a set of subsystems associated with the semiotic characteristics of all spoken language levels concerning phonation, articulation, acoustics, auditory perception. Each level includes «bundles» of special signs. The combination of these semiotic components guarantees reliable characterization of interpersonal and intercultural speech communication. The basis of this phenomenon is semiotic heterogenity of speech communication as a whole. In the paper some aspects of the semiotic characteristics of speech activity are discussed.