Variant – 3 What problems is text semantics concerned with?

What does text grammar study?



Text grammar. Text grammar presupposes the study of models and rules of text production. The accent is made on text as an aggregate of sentences united to form complex syntactical units. Text grammar covers a wide range of questions: structural and semantic integrity of the text, its segmentation, lexical and grammatical cohesion, thematic and rhematic aspects of the 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).
One of the major problems of Text Grammar is structural and semantic integrity of the text, therefore so much attention is attached to the notions of cohesion and coherence. It is acknowledged that cohesion, regarded as various (syntactical, lexical, stylistic, grammatical, etc) types of correlation between text components, is a basic category constituting text as such. However, there are several directions in the study of text cohesion. G.V. Kolshanskiy distinguishes syntactical, semantic and communicative cohesion (1984). T. van Dijk differentiates micro- and macro-cohesion. Micro- cohesion is a surface correlation between the sentences of the text; macro-cohesion is related to a deep text structure (1972). A.I. Novikov differs internal and external means of cohesion. Internal cohesion is based on the thematic unity of a text, external – deals with grammatical and lexical means (Новиков, 1983:26-27). O.I. Moskalskaya describes semantic, communicative and structural means of cohesion (Москальская,1984:17). From all this it follows that cohesion is understood in two senses: as a surface cohesion confined to formal structural means explicated at the verbal layer of the text, and a deep semantic cohesion dealing with the semantic integrity of the text. In order to differentiate these two types some linguists introduce two different terms: “cohesion” pertaining to a formal verbal level, and “coherence” related to a semantic integrity of the text.