ВОСПРОИЗВОДИМОСТЬ ЯЗЫКОВЫХ ЕДИНИЦ: ЛИНГВО-КОГНИТИВНЫЙ АСПЕКТ

Modern linguistics provides no unified interpretation for the term «reproducibility»; thus the category itself and reproducible language units are defined differently in scientific literature. The phenomenon of language unit reproducibility as of the speaker's ability to retrieve from memory and apply not only words but syntactic constructions, as we see it, needs serious consideration.

Linguistics refers to reproducibility, first of all, at the lexicological and phraseological level of the language. It is well-known that reproducibility – that is the ability of the word to be the same in any two different cases of its usage (e.g., in two different acts of speech; in the speech of two different people; or in two different cases of the same person’s speech) - is a major feature of the word. The ability to reproduce or repeat words; or repeatability of the word in speech seems to be a self-evident language reality. Reproducibility of the word (or any other language unit) is an integral condition of the very existence and functioning of the language as a means of communication; thus, it is natural for us to expect that different speech segments, pronounced and heard by different people, at different moments and in different places, will make the same language units, in particular, the same words. If in every speech segment distinguished as a word the word represented something absolutely unique, non-reproducible, non-equal to what a native speaker may find in other speech segments, there would be no information exchange between people, since to understand someone else’s speech one would have to know most, if not all, its components. Thus, to understand speech one should be able to perceive its components as reproducible units that are already familiar, that is to equate them with certain familiar units.

The problem of equality occurs then in connection with the fact that in the course of the language use words are reproduced again and again as some units already existing in the language, and each, actually existing in this particular language, word is regularly observed in various cases of its use, in various cases of its replication. Meanwhile, particular cases of the same word's replication are opposed to all the possible volume of other words use, even if those other words have much in common with this particular one.

It should be mentioned that reproducibility does not have only this lexical and semantic nature. For instance, Alexander Smirnitsky believes that when characterizing grammatical and non-grammatical phenomena one should consider the criterion of reproducibility. According to Smirnitsky, it is an important property of word-forms, within which categorial forms can be distinguished and which are part of grammatical category structure, that they are reproducible in speech thus contributing to the reproducibility of grammatical categories as solid units at the grammatical level [Смирницкий 1956].

The term ‘reproducibility’ is most widely used in the phraseological conception, according to which reproducibility is seen as functional repeatability of units, their ability to be retrieved from memory ready to be used, which is opposed to the free choice and combination of language units in speech. However, reproducibility is not exclusively a property of phraseological units since it characterizes language units at other levels.

It should be admitted that reproducibility – as ability to be a permanent, historically fixed language sign reflecting reality; to be repeated as one and the same unit in different texts; to be retrieved from the language arsenal as a ready-to-use item – is a most common property of phraseological units, distinguishing them from collocations and bringing them closer to the word. Above all else,  this feature unites all phraseological units.

The features of stability and reproducibility are characteristic of phraseological units. The named features make the base for classifications of phraseological units. Stability refers to the ability of a phraseological unit to be reproduced in speech as a ready form, with frequent replication of a particular word combination leading to a certain type of dependence between them, which then gets fixed, for instance, in dictionaries and reference books and later is realized in speech again. That is not only the changeability of units but particular properties of inner, structural features, conditioning the character of reproducibility.

However, in linguistic literature, no differentiation is traced between reproducibility and stability of the phraseological unit; and sometimes reproducibility is explained through the stability of a unit.

International scholars have made attempts to define the category of reproducibility and to identify reproducible units; however, linguists never seemed to differentiate between the factors which condition lexical, phraseological and grammatical reproducibility whose concept was easily mixed with that of idiomaticity. So, researchers of English phraseology, describing idiomaticity features either as a speech anomaly breaking either the laws of grammar or the laws of logic [Smith 1925], or as “use of common words and word forms to mean something unusual” [Ball 1958], found no system in the typology of language unit reproducibility factors in the English language, with only a few features common for both idiomaticity and reproducibility: e.g., the regular character of use; deviation from the strict grammar rules in reference to the use of forms; ability of phrases to be used metaphorically; secondary variations of word order, causing change in the meaning, etc.

Among Russian linguists, Victor V. Vinogradov was the one to research reproducibility and to state that “the very fact of stability and semantic limitation of phraseological units shows that in reality they are used as ready phraseological units, which are reproducible, not constructed anew, in the speech process” [Виноградов 1947: 160]. It should be noted, though, that stability, seen as ability to be used “ready-made”, refers not only to phraseological units but to words of any structure, as well as to some types of items intermediate between collocations and phraseological units or compound words, which are ready signs.

Nikolay M. Shansky followed V. Vinogradov, supposing that phrases belong to ready-made language units, are reproduced in speech due to tradition and possess a definite lexical composition with a known meaning and grammatical construction. Shansky does not differentiate between stability and reproducibility, believing that “unlike collocations, phraseological units should be seen as stable combinations of words, which are reproducible, holistic in their meaning and stable in their composition and structure” [Шанский 1996: 26]. No differentiation in reference to the terms ‘stability’ and ‘reproducibility’ is observed in the works of V. Arkhangelsky, S. Gavrilin, Y. Gvozdarev, who see stability as a category necessarily correlating with reproducibility.

V. Zhukov reveals a different understanding of the correlation between stability and reproducibility, stating that these two categories are not equal: “Stability osculates reproducibility, with represents regular repetition, renewal of this or that unit in speech. Among the readily reproduced units there should be named those of various complexity, i.e. non-homogeneous: phraseological units, phraseological combinations, compound terms and notions, proverbs and sayings, etc. On the contrary, stability … implies semantic indivisibility of the components and thus characterizes the real ‘semantic structure complexity’ of homogeneous language units and phraseological units” [Жуков 1986: 9-10]. Consequently, “all language units that are stable are reproducible, while not all reproducible ‘extra-word’ items possess stability” [ibid: 5-7].

Hence, one can conclude that stability and reproducibility are osculant but not identical. All language units that are stable are reproducible, while not all reproducible items are stable, and not only stable combinations (phrases) with desemantized components but full syntactic constructions can be reproduced.

Russian researchers of syntax often address the issue of syntactic constructions reproducibility (V. Vinogradov,  L. Roizenson, S. Ter-Minasova, N.Gvishiany, R. Kobrin, K. Averbukh, M. Zadorozhniy, V. Kipriyanov, E. Kubryakova, Y. Fomenko, N. Yudina, K. Sigal, etc.). One should remember that syntactic constructions themselves are not reproducible, while their formal-structural and semantic schemes are reproducible and realized in the processes of formation of constructions, i.e. combinations of particular words belonging to particular grammatical classes. Hence, one can refer to syntactic reproducibility as a property of the construction gained through ‘realization of a structural scheme (model) … in a particular lexical combination in a particular cultural-historical period of the language functioning’ [Сигал 2010: 29].

Each model is used by any listener and any speaker an unlimited number of times – a property correlating with the reproducibility of language units. Every time, the sentence is composed of new words in particular grammatical forms according to the communicative intention of the speaker, but this freedom of lexical, morphological and other variation of the sentence leads to the situation when it is hard to define the status of the produced or reproduced construction, and only proper consideration of all linguistic and extra-linguistic features of reproducibility, as well as experimental data on the unit’s functioning, may, as it seems to us, define this status. 
Besides proper linguistic basis, reproducibility is conditioned cognitively. The cognitive conception of reproducibility (Y. Karaulov, V. Krasnykh, D. Gudkove, I. Zakharenko) links it with the concept of precedence and precedential phenomena: precedential notions, precedential texts and precedential utterings. The precedential phenomenon is well-known to all speakers of the same language since they know about its existence and possess a common nationally-deterministic invariant of its perception. In other words, behind the precedential phenomenon “there is always some vision of it, common and obligatory for all the speakers of the same national-cultural mentality, or an invariant of its perception” [Brilyova, Volskaya, etc. 2004: 16]. According to Y. Karaulov, a reproducible unit is a unit tending to possess some invariant character, i.e. “a stable image, a stereotype…, a continual verbal symbol, able to unfold into a whole segment of the ‘picture of the world’, which is expressed by a word, a morpheme, a root, a phrase” [Karaulov 1987: 181].  According to Y. Karaulov, there is a special group of extra-linguistic textual phenomena, possessing reproducibility – the so-called precedential texts [Karaulov 2002]. Those are texts that are well-known within a certain speech community, due to which they are continually addressed, referred to and quoted. However, their reproducibility does not make them language units since in that case “all well-known poems, jokes and prayers should be included into the lexical and phraseological composition of the language” [Teliya 1996: 75].

Hence, it can be concluded that the cognitive definition of precedential phenomena disaccords with the definition of reproducible units in phraseology due to its methodology and its subject, but, most important, as we see it, is the fact that both concepts, while being single-aspect in the choice and analysis of reproducible units, still study units that differ in their semantics, structure, language status and functioning; that belong to both the corpora of linguistically free and linguistically non-free units, which proves the fact of reproducibility and stability categories being not identical, as well as the fact that the list of reproducible units cannot be limited to phraseological units only.