This article examines the key trends in the development of speech studies (rechevedenie), or the linguistics of speech. Over the past hundred years the focus of linguistic attention has shifted from language (langue) to speech (parole) – as an object that is not only individual but also social – and then to langage, human speech taken in its entirety, which F. de Saussure held to be unstudiable. Unsurprisingly, the study of langage has met with fundamental methodological difficulties, and the description of heterogeneous speech phenomena has predictably proved eclectic: numerous particular research domains have been identified, but the connections between them remain unestablished. The article asks what direction linguistics is taking in the post-non-classical period of science, which has turned to the study of complex self-developing systems (V.S. Stepin), and whether this turn can overcome the fragmentation of research on the speech continuum. The aim of the article is to show that the study of the heterogeneous reality of living speech displays the features of a new type of scientific rationality, and that the logic of linguistic development entails approaching language as a complex self-developing system. Its model may be constructed in accordance with M.M. Bakhtin’s linguistic methodology, which prescribes a movement from (1) forms and types of speech interaction to (2) forms of speech performances (“speech genres”), and then to (3) forms of language. These are the three principal levels of a self-developing system that is itself nested within the larger system of social communication. The article argues that the eclecticism of linguistic research can be overcome once the place of each research domain within the complex system is determined – that is, once its links with other domains are established both within a single level of systemic organization and across levels, as well as with the external environment. The construction of such a model is not a project with a definite endpoint but a methodological guideline for the integration of linguistic knowledge. Functional stylistics is used to trace these changes in the study of the speech continuum. In this discipline the move towards integrating concepts on the basis of complex systems theory is especially clear.