NATURE OF THE LINGUISTIC TERM “DISCURSE” IN ITS RELATIONTO TEXT AND LITERARY TENSE AS A TEXT-FORMING CATEGORY

Abstract

The article presents an attempt to analyze the content of the term “discourse” and formulate a definition which fully and unambiguously expresses the semantics of its meaning, since the great variability of the existing definitions of the term leads to ambiguity in understanding its essence. In the article discourse is considered from the position of: a) dividing speech into internal and external under the condition of semantic identity of information in each kind of speech and b) the emergence of communicative links in the case of equal intellectual level of information sender and recipient. As a result, discourse is defined as a bifunctional speech phenomenon based on a common intellectual and informative level that unites communicants into a single communication field, the result of which is a text and one of the fundamental categories determining its creation is literary tense.