Russian speech and its real initial units

The article is devoted to the main questions of Russian speech: its creation, initial units and their perception. It consequently demarcates linguistic spheres of language and speech and their units. It is reasonable to differentiate the study of language and the study of speech as two linguistic disciplines distincting in their nature, character and units’ designation. The author identifies units of oral and written forms in speech, and its minimal non-discrete unit - syntagma. The topicality of the article lies in theoretical and practical meaning of a syntagma as an initial speech unit, its role in forming and developing all types of speech activity. The aim of the article is to define the real structure of speech and the basic unit of its creation. It is proved that the real structure and initial speech components are better revealed due to its author’s delimitation. It is asserted that intonation for the speaker is a way to interpret the content, and for the addressees it is a means of its identification: the speaker clearly differentiates all initial components of his speech with the pauses, and the listeners explicitly understand their meaning. The author of the article correlates written speech units and oral speech units, reveals typological features of syntagmas, demarcates syntagmas according to their form, structure, length, characterizes their relation to speech creation and perception, both oral and written forms. The stipulation of syntagmas activity in the speech is determined. Attention is paid to syntagmatic and sentence structures of the text. The pragmatic aspect of syntagma theory is highlighted.