Variant – 3 What problems is text semantics concerned with?

Discuss wide and narrow approaches to text. What is the difference between them?

The notion of “text” refers to one of the most complicated, ambiguous and polysemantic notions, and it is the object of study not only in text linguistics, but also in many other humanitarian sciences – theory of literature, textology, history, germenevtics, aesthetics, culturology and others. As ‘M.M. Bakhtin stated, text is an initial point of any humanitarian science (Бахтин, 1986:474). So, the definition of text seems to be a very difficult problem because it depends on the area of investigation, the chosen approach and aims.

there is a difference of opinions concerning the length of the text (words, utterance, passage, quotation, proverb, saying, article, book) and its form (written or oral). In the linguistic literature there are also quite different definitions of text.
So, different scholars concentrate their attention on different sides and aspects of the text. According to some linguistic data there are more than 300 definitions of text (Белянин, 1999). It should be admitted that it is impossible to give a universal and generally accepted definition of text because of its complicated and multifold character. Though the notion of text in its practical sense, for instance, text as a story, article or advertisement is easily understood, however, from the scientific point of view it is difficult, if possible at all, to achieve the unanimity of opinions. It would be reasonable to assume that each scientific trend presents the notion of “text” in its own way proceeding from the aims of investigation.
Another problem that causes confusion is the text delimitation. It raises some questions: what are the boundaries of the text? – a sentence? a complex syntactical unit? a passage or a book? As many scholars claim there are two approaches to this problem: wide and narrow. O. I. Moskalyskaya, for example, distinguishes macrotext (a literary work) and microtext (a complex syntactical whole). But she regards these text types as quite different units, one (microtext) is a syntactical phenomenon, the other – a product of speech activity and social communication. So, different criteria of text definitions presuppose different approaches to text analysis. When analyzing a microtext the focus is brought into its syntactical and compositional structure, whereas a macrotext entails the problems of communicative, cognitive and socio- cultural character.

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