Humanities & Social Sciences 3 (2017 10) 298-302 ~ ~ ~ УДК 81’42 On the Problem of Contemporary Discourse in Linguistics Olga V. Aleksandrova* Lomonosov Moscow State University 1 Leninskie Gory, Moscow, 119991, Russia Received 04.12.2016, received in revised form 10.01.2016, accepted 23.01.2017 The article discusses how a new paradigm that emerged in linguistics on the brink of the 20th-21st centuries – cognitive linguistics – reborn the interest of scholars to the notion of discourse and the possibility of its definition and use of this term in modern linguistic research. <...> Judging by the researchers, it appeared far back in the Latin language as “discursus” and meant “to run back and forth” that time (Demiankov, 2005). <...> As a term discourse was reborn with the introduction of structural linguistics in the middle of the last century to nominate mainly the oral dialogical speech when linguists were in particular keen on the oral speech which had not been pretty much investigated before. <...> In the end of the 20th century the term became ingrained in all the humanities and political studies and still is keeping its triumphant progress on in different spheres of the human knowledge. <...> How can we explain such a wide spreading of this term in different academic spheres, or, even, in our everyday life? <...> The end of the 20th century was marked with the emergence of the new scientific paradigm: © Siberian Federal University. <...> All rights reserved functionalism together with cognitive science were recognized as a new turn in linguistics. <...> The performance of every new knowledge paradigm is invariably linked to reconsideration of those heritages which it gains from the previous paradigms and – mainly – from fundamental ideas comprising the topical area in science. <...> Such situation has also influenced the definition of language per se within the cognitive science which considers it as an access arrangement to the brain’s functions, mental activity and processes performed by the person. <...> Under the new paradigm the language is understood as a specific sign system which allows the human to treat their own kind for the purpose to exchange the information or to apply it any other way and provides us with different types of human behavior studies in general. <...> Through this perspective the language * Corresponding author E-mail address: ovaleksandrova@gmail.com – 298 – Olga V. Aleksandrova. <...> On the Problem of Contemporary Discourse <...>