Comment in an Oral Text in Light of the Theory of Speech Genres

The article discusses the linguistic theory of speech genres and the heuristic possibilities of its application in Folklore studies using the material of fairy tales recorded by professional collectors in interviews. The question is raised about the speech-genre status of a fairy tale and a performer’s commentary, and the question of the relationship between these types of text and the factors that determine these relationships. Using the methodological tools of the theory of speech genres, the tendency characteristic of the “informative dialogue” (make-know discourse, “dialogue-1” according to N.D. Arutyunova) to place the actual folklore narrative in the “capsule” of an autobiographical story about the history of the narrator’s acquaintance with the text is considered. As a result of the analysis, I qualify the storyteller’s “commentary” as an element (microgenre) not of a fairy tale, but of the macrogenre “interview/ conversation”, breaking through into the folklore text. At the same time, I describe conversational discourse as a speech environment in which the folklore text is immersed and within which it exists and is explicated. Thus, theoretical approaches to the concept of speech genres can be useful in the studies of oral tradition texts, allowing folklore texts to be included in a single general field of research.