Variant – 3 What problems is text semantics concerned with?

Rain –a symbol of unhappiness, loneliness and sufferings in the works by E.Hemingway;
Sandcastle - a symbol of illusive love and unreal dreams (A. Murdock);
Oak tree- a symbol of powerful England (J.Galsworthy);
White monkey - a symbol of spiritual bankruptcy (J.Galsworthy)

2. 
   Point out the main characteristics of text linguistics as a scientific discipline.
   

Text Linguistics is an independent branch of linguistics which studies text, its structure and semantics, the principles of text formation and perception, methods of text analysis, etc. The ideas of this science are traced back to the fundamental works by famous Russian and foreign linguists – A.A. Potebnya, L.V. Scherba. V.V. Vinogradov, M.M. Bakhtin, R. Jacobson, Z. Harris. As a separate branch Text Linguistics came into existence in 60-70^th, and it is connected with the research of such well-known scholars as G.V. Kolshanskiy, I.R. Galperin, Z.Y. Turaeva and O.I. Moskalskaya.

The well-known linguist, T. van Dijk made a valuable contribution to text linguistics. He states that text theory is an interdisciplinary science, which integrates separate independent scientific trends such as linguistics, history, theology, jurisprudence and others. The object of all these sciences is the text which is studied from different angles and with different aims. In Text Linguistics T. van Dijk differentiates three aspects: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. T. van Dijk was the first to introduce the notion of semantic macrostructure, specifying the semantic content of the text, its global integrity. Further on, the Amsterdam scholar uses the term “discourse”, and studies its pragmatic and cognitive aspects. He argues that a text can be understood only within the framework of a certain situation, and introduces the notion of “situational models”, which is considered a basis of cognitive discourse processing. Much attention is directed to discourse analysis, knowledge structures, the ways of their presentation in the text and conceptual organization (van Dijk, 1989).
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.

3.