Variant – 3 What problems is text semantics concerned with?

What are the main properties of text?

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. Different approaches to text can be evidenced by its various definitions in the lexicographical sources:

● any written material (CCELD)
●a book or other piece of writing(COD)
● a written or spoken passage (CCELD)
● original words of an author or orator (OSDCE)
● written or printed words forming a literary work (PED)
● quotation, proverb, saying (PED)
● passage of Scripture, subject of sermon (COD)
● theme, topic (WNDS)
● the words to a musical composition (CERD)
● an utterance or article given in the written or printed form (LDCE)
As is seen from these definitions, 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. It will suffice to bring out some of them given in the most known researches:
● text is a sequence of verbal signs, its main characteristics are cohesion and coherence (Кубрякова, 2001);
● text is an organized multitude of sentences united by different types of lexical, logical and grammatical links, a complex structural and semantic unit conveying certain information (Тураева, 1986);
● text is an utterance both in written or oral form, characterized by semantic-structural completeness, the author’s modality, a certain communicative aim and pragmatic intentions (Шевченко, 2003);
● text in its narrow sense (microtext) is a complex syntactical whole, in its wide sense it is a literary work (novel, story, essay, etc) (Москальская,1981);
● text is a linear sequence of verbal signs, semantically and intentionally completed, a compositional unit expressed by either graphical (written) or oral means (Чернявская, 2009).
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.

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