M. Iriskulov, A. Kuldashev a course in Theoretical English Grammar Tashkent 2008

II. The textual linguistics.
When modern linguistics began to emerge, it was customary to limit 
investigation to the framework of the sentence as the largest unit with an inherent 
structure
(L. Bloomfield). All the other structures, as different from the sentence, were 
assigned to the field of stylistics. The reason for this lies with the fact that it is 
much more straightforward to decide what constitutes a grammatical or 
acceptable sentence than what constitutes a grammatical or acceptable sentence 
sequence, paragraph or text, as the text formation is characterized by lesser 
conformity with established rules.
Teun van Dirk stresses that “text linguistics” is in fact a designation for any 
linguistic investigation devoted to the text as the primary object of inquiry. There 
is a number of disciplines which, for various motives, share many concerns with a 
science of texts: rhetoric, stylistics, anthropology, discourse analysis. For example, 
anthropology scrutinizes texts as cultural artifacts (B. Malinovsky) Special 
attention was devoted to myths and folktales (C. Levi-Strauss). Discourse analysis 

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(the study of conversation) brings into focus the mechanisms which combine texts 
as single contributions into a set of relevant texts directed to each other, reveal the 
standards of textuality (cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, 
situationality, intertextuality, informativity) (M. Coulthard).
In the field of linguistics proper, i.e. philology, the text was generally 
considered a marginal entity until it became hard to ignore any longer. Thus, 
comparing word order in ancient and modern languages H. Weil detected another 
principle besides grammar: the relations of “thoughts” to each other evidently 
affect the arrangement of words in sentences. His investigations were renewed by 
Czech linguists (“Prague School”) under the notion of functional sentence 
perspective. 
The first large-scale inquiry into text organization was performed by R. 
Harweg within the descriptive structural approach. R. Harweg postulated that 
texts are hold together by the mechanism of “substitution” (one expression 
following up another one of the same sense and thus forming a cohesive or 
coherent relationship). His notion of “substitution” is extraordinary broad and 
complex, 
subsuming 
relationships 
such 
as 
synonymy, 
class/instance, 
subclass/superclass, cause/effect, part/whole. The main tendencies of the text 
studies within the structural approach are as follows: the text was defined as a unit 
larger than the sentence (K. Pike), research proceeded by discovering types of text 
structures and classifying them in some sort of scheme.
The transformational generative grammar approach combined with the basic 
principles of cognitive psychology provides a process-oriented model of the text,
i.e. the model of text generating (T.A. van Dirk, I. Mel’cuk, A. Zolkovskiy). T.A. 
van Dirk introduced the notion of macrostructure: a statement of the content of a 
text, and reasoned that the generating of a text must begin with a main idea which 
gradually evolves into the detailed meanings that enter sentences with the help of
“literary operations”. When a text is presented, there must be operations which 
work in the other direction to extract the main idea back out again. Thus, the main 
concern of T.A. van Dirk’s study is to describe cognitive processes that can render 
texts “literary”. A different line has been adopted in the work of I. Mel’cuk. He 
argues that the central operation of a text model should be the transition between
“meaning” and text, i.e. how meaning is expressed in a text or abstracted out of a
text, which is possible due to the speaker’s/hearer’s ability to express/identify one 
and the same idea in a number of synonymous utterances. Thus, I. Mel’cuk 
adopts the text model as that one of meaning representation in cognitive 
continuity. All the discussed trends of the text study illustrate the evolution in 
theory and method of text linguistics.
The main target of the text linguistics of the present day is to describe various 
text types used in discourse, explain both the shared features and the distinctions 
among texts of different types, i.e. to find out what standards texts must fulfill, 
how they might be produced or received. In modern text linguistics a text is 
defined as a communicative occurrence which meets particular standards 
(categories) of textuality. If any of these standards is not considered to have been 
satisfied, the text will not be communicative (R.Beaugrande, W. Dressler).

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Different scholars point out various parameters of the text: Ts.Todorov –verbal, 
syntactic, semantic; N.E. Enkvist –topic, focus, linkage; I.R.Galperin – informative 
contents, cohesion, prospection, retrospection, modality, integrity, completeness; 
R. Beaugrande and W. Dressler – cohesion, coherence, intentionality, 
acceptability, informativity, situationality, intertextuality.
Cohesion and coherence are the most obvious categories of textuality. They 
indicate how the component elements of the text fit together and make sense. 
Cohesion concerns the ways in which the components of the surface text , i.e. the 
actual words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence. The 
surface components depend upon each other according to grammatical forms and 
conventions, such that cohesion rests upon grammatical dependencies. The notion 
of cohesion includes all the functions which can be used to signal relations among 
surface elements, e.g.: the road sign: slow