Prospection in academic communication and interpreter’s anticipation skills

Abstract

This paper discusses teaching anticipation skills to student interpreters through the linguistic analysis of text. The approach proposed in this paper is based on the notion of prospection as a functional semantic category inherent in any text. Prospection reflects the author’s communicative strategy in determining the text’s perspective and guides the reader in connecting discourse events and details. The paper’s thesis suggests that to help develop prospection skills, we should analyze texts belonging to a certain type of discourse, specifically. This determined the choice of material for analysis, namely, academic texts, since they reflect the process of learning and discovery, when the researcher moves from a naïve or false understanding of a phenomenon to discovery of its true essence. From the arsenal of relationships between epistemological objects such as ideas, hypothesis, argument, conclusion, assumption, etc., the paper chooses to focus on contrast, which – as experienced interpreters rightly point out – is of a particular importance in predicting a text’s potential direction. The paper shows how the ‘truth vs falsehood’ dichotomy is represented in terms of its contact and distance connectors as well as content components. However, prospection reveals not just the metadiscourse elements organizing the text, but also demonstrates the two-layered nature inherent in academic discourse. One layer is represented by gnoseological objects and relationships between them. Gnoseological objects which constitute a permanent element of the semantic construction implemented by universal language means, regardless of academic field, are present in both parts of the ‘truth vs falsehood’ dichotomy. The second layer of semantic content is represented by ontological objects, also linked by a special relationship. This layer is variable and depends on the specific object of research. The paper postulates that a structured approach to systematic study of the meanings and structural elements of the first – gnoseological – layer allows us to develop students' predictive skills, specifically in interpreting academic conference reports and messages.