A speech can be one of several things but the use of this term is always associated with verbal or linguistic transmission of some kind.
For linguistics and social sciences, speech is a form of transposition of both written and verbal language and is used to refer to the construction of a message by an interlocutor, to the form, style or particular characteristics of the speech of an individual and the notion of verbal communication of various kinds. In turn, for other social sciences, discourse is a communication event of a different nature. Even for some thinkers such as Michel Foucault, the concept of discourse refers to a system of ideas or thought: the discourse of an individual corresponds to a socio-historical context, with their personal characteristics, with their social and geographical belonging, and so on. In this way, the concepts of "discourse" and "story" are usually associated, in reference to all the ideological or cultural content of an individual, or even of a group of people or of a specific ideology. In general, the supporters of a certain idea or of a set of doctrines situated in a temporal context use related concepts or phrases that end up motivating a "liberal discourse", "Marxist discourse" or "contemporary discourse", among other examples.
However, the most common way of referring to a speech is with respect to the verbal and oral act of addressing a particular audience to convey a message. In this sense, it is a coherent system of sentences that refer to the same theme. In a conference, for example, speech is the parliament that a person uses to introduce a topic, to convey their perspective on a problem or issue, to take stock or to call for controversy. A speech can be more or less informal, shorter or longer, it can be mainly oral or make use of other technological resources, it can have a political background or simply take place at a work or even family celebration such as a wedding. However, in all cases and since the origins of this social practice, the purpose of a discourse has always been to communicate and / or present a point of view seeking to persuade the interlocutors of the same.
Given the complexity and variety of this notion, discourse is the object of study of various disciplines such as linguistics. Discourse analysis is in fact a discipline that runs through various sciences such as anthropology, sociology, philosophy and psychology that aims to investigate the causes, effects and context of discourse production with the purpose of interpreting it and assigning meaning to it. a speech individually or to a set of speeches. In this context, advertising has been added to this series of disciplines, which constitutes an appropriate system to define the characteristics of a discourse and, especially, of its arrival at a certain audience.
One of the most investigated types of speeches is that which takes place in the political sphere: the analysis of the messages transmitted by political candidates in campaign or in office is broad and rich, and includes aspects as specific as grammar, phonetics, rhetoric, argumentation, narration, syntax and semantics. Some great speakers have served as models for the creation of speeches at much later times. In this way, subjects are recognized who, with only a written base, are capable of delivering a speech of great content and arrival, while other politicians prefer to have the text in full written form, thus ensuring an orderly transmission of the message. chosen message for potential recipients.
