27,28. Text linguistics. Discourse. Categories of text. Cohesion.

Text linguistics is a relatively new branch of language studies that deals with texts as communication systems. At the early stage of its development in the 60s of the 20^th century, text linguistics dealt mainly with ways of expressing cohesion and

coherence and distribution of the theme and the rheme of an utterance according to the rules of the functional sentence perspective. Contemporary text linguistics studies the text and its structure, its categories and components as well as ways of constructing texts. Text linguistics takes into account the form of the text, but also its setting, i.e. the way in which it is situated communicative context. The main problem of text linguistics – there is no universal definition of the text because scholars study the text in its various aspects: grammatical, stylistic, semantic, functional and so on.

Discourse, in its broadest definition, refers to a written or spoken type of communication. Discourse is studied by the discourse – discipline which attempts to discover deeper various types of written or spoken language.

The textual category is a property characterizing every text, in other words, it is a typological feature of a text. Today the list of textual categories is open: linguists name different textual

categories because they approach the text from different angles. The most commonly identified textual categories include:

1) divisibility – the text can be divided into parts, chapters and paragraphs dealing with specific topics, therefore having some formal and semantic independence;

2) cohesion – formal connectedness;

3) coherence – internal connectedness (integrity, according to I. R. Galperin);

4) prospection (flash-forward) – anticipation of future events;

5) retrospection (flash-back) – return to events in the past;

(Both prospection and retrospection break the space-time continuum of the text.)

6) anthropocentricity – the Man is the central figure of any text independent of its specific theme, message and plot;

7) conceptuality – any text has a message. Expressing some idea, that is, conveying a message is the basis of any creative work;

8) informativity

Cohesion (one of the criteria of textuality) can be defined as the links that hold a text together and give it meaning. The term cohesion was introduced by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to denote the way in which linguistic items of which texts are constituted are meaningfully interconnected in sequences. There are two main types of cohesion: grammatical, referring to the structural content, and lexical, referring to the language content.

Cohesive text is created through many different ways: reference, ellipsis, substitution, lexical cohesion, and conjunction.