In linguistics, the study of speaking verbs, such as verbs of speech, communicative verbs is researched in different directions, both domestic and foreign scientists set themselves different tasks. They were studied from the point of view of their lexical and grammatical semantics, from the point of view of the syntactic properties of these verbs, at the functional level, in the aspect of the relationship between thinking and speech, the logical and semantic properties of speech verbs. However, there are still no works in linguistics that consider the functional categorization of speaking verbs with a mechanism description for varying their categorical status from the standpoint of functional, semiological and prototypical approaches to the formation of the categorical meaning of predicative units. The verbs say, tell, speak and talk carry one integral symptom “speaking”, while the linguistic units have differential signs in their semantic meaning. In this regard, the verbs say, tell, speak and talk are attributed to the nuclear zone, and their synonyms are in the peripheral zones. The concept of “speaking” in modern English can be objectified at the linguistic level in the most generalized form, stylistically neutralized by the verbs say, tell, speak and talk, which we define as prototypes of the concept study.