Genesis of the multidisciplinary communicative metadiscourse: on emergence of communication sciences in Russia

Abstract

The paper attempts to explain why modern Russian communication science has a multidisciplinary theoretical basis. The author hypothesises that modern Russian "communicative-theoretical eclecticism" formed historically, being genetically related to the entry into the Russian scientific lexicon the word "communication" with different meanings at different times in different disciplinary spheres; this in turn led to the emergence of a number of traditions that differ for different scientific areas and paved the way for the coexistence of a variety of concepts, now constituting the field of communication studies.
The author shows the disciplinary structure of Russian Communication Studies on the example of the array analysis of 4,635 abstracts of theses on various issues of communication, defended from 1987 to 2015. Reference is made to 20 scientific fields, which are conducted communication studies from 23 possible in the classification of the Higher Attestation Commission under the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. A special analysis of Russian scientific publications since the end of the XIX century up until the present, in which the key word "communication" was mentioned, made it possible to clarify the chronology of its appearance in a particular disciplinary field, which led to the identification of the traditional areas of communication studies in Russia. Among them are the key ones: philological, psychological, sociological (social science), biological (animal psychology), cybernetic.