The Ethnology of Verbal Discourse

The article deals with the most general ideas and categories of special science - the ethnology of verbal discourse (ethnology of speech), which is a part of linguistic anthropology. This is the direction of discourse analysis, founded in the middle of the XX century by American linguists D. Hymes and G. Gumperz, almost unknown in Russia. The author focuses his analysis on the individual aspects of verbal discourse, but also shows its social aspects (communicative competence), because the starting point of analysis in these studies is the speech community or other social context.