The main trends of text linguistics

THE MAIN TRENDS OF TEXT LINGUISTICS

The survey of the linguistic literature and our own observa­tions enable us to outline the following main directions:

• general text theory

• text grammar

• text semantics

• text stylistics and interpretation

• text typology

General text theory

• General theory ofthe text covers a wide range oftheoretical questions including:
• •outline of text linguistics as a branch of general linguistics, its history, evolution, approaches, directions, its object and subject, the main tasks;
• definition of“text”,its main features, categories and boundaries, principles oftext construction and text perception
• links between text linguistics and other sciences

Text grammar

• Text grammar presupposes the study ofmodels and rules of text production. The accent is made on text as an aggregate of sen­
• tences united to form complex syntactical units. Text grammar covers a wide range ofquestions: structural and semantic integrity of the text, its segmentation, lexical and grammatical cohesion, thematic and rhematic aspects ofthe text, compositional structure, sentence arrangement in the text, text forming functions of lin­guistic units, text delimitation and others. All these problems have been sufficiently discussed in the text book by O. I. Moskalskaya (1981).

Text semantics

• Text semantics covers a wide range of problems:
• the notion of semantic integrity;
• the semantic structure ofthe text;
• the main units ofthe semantic structure ofthe text;
• the correlation of the surface layer of the text and its content, interaction of“surface” and “deep” structures;
• the correlation ofthe linguistic and extralinguistic factors ofthe text;
• content analysis ofthe text.

Text semantics

• The semantic structure of the text is presented by a chain of Complexly interwoven and mutually complementary themes subdi­vided into subthemes and microthemes reflecting events, actions, fects ofreality. According to A.I. Novikov, text content is a dyna­mic model of some fragments of reality (1983:73). Consequently, tile main task of text semantics is to reveal correlations between verbal signs and mental content, between the verbal layer of the text and its mental representation.

Text stylistics and interpretation

• There are close links observed between text linguistics and stylistics. Many notions oftext linguistics, be it repeated, had long been discussed in stylistics, and it is quite valid since stylistics is based on the study of texts, mainly literary texts. Therefore it is expedient to single out a stylistic trend in text linguistics, which embraces a great variety ofproblems:

Text stylistics

• text types related to the problem offunctional styles
• compositional structure of the text
• stylistic text categories
• stylistic means of cohesion and coherence;
• stylistic peculiarities of an individual style;
• • the role of language units in transmitting conceptual information and representation of the conceptual world picture

Text typology

• Studies different types of texts, criteria for their differentiation,linguistic and
• Extralinguistic peculiarities of text types,their taxonomy and classification

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