On Feasibility of Using Chronotope for Description of Lecture Genre

Abstract

Any lecture and particularly an academic lecture, as a genre of scientific discourse, is a unique and extremely interesting material for research. Lectures that authors (lecturers) present to students are thought-out, essentially prepared but spontaneous texts as regards the form of their representation. The main purpose of a lecture is the formation of certain scientific ideas, which requires constant interaction with students, constant influence upon them and, most importantly, constant assessment: to what extent functional the speech is. The composition of the lecture is not linear, its narration may contain cross-references to the ideas mentioned before, as well as projections of what will be said later, and every step of such kind is not just a movement forward or backward, these are actions that create a link between the components of the information presented by the lecturer. It is impossible to predict the whole system of such actions. It depends on the specific conditions under which the lecture is given, but the varieties of the steps in the lecture genre given above can be defined and studied. From our perspective for the description of the non-linear structure of the lecture, it is appropriate to use the concept of "chronotope". While creating the lecture, the author generates a model of time and space in which the speech action takes place. The main feature of lecture chronotope is the existence of several levels of organization, since it has its own internal, spatio-temporal coordinates. However, it's included not only in the framework of a whole lecture course but also in the general system of science development. The explication of the lecture chronotope is carried out at different levels of text organization, both at the level of composition, and at the level of vocabulary and grammar, all of which are interconnected.