Lecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar

3. Textual Categories
The textual category is a property characterizing every text, in other words,
it is a typological feature of a text. Textual categories appear and function only in
the text as a language unit of the highest rank. It is important to remember that the
text is never modeled by one textual category but always by a totality of
categories. It is sometimes regarded as a total of categories.
Today the list of textual categories is open: linguists name different textual
categories because they approach the text from different angles. Most scholars
differentiate between contensive and structural categories. However, some
linguists draw a strict demarcation line between the two while others do not. 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
Prof. I. R. Galperin whose book on the text and its categories is one of the
most authoritative and often quoted ones identifies three types of information:
- content-factual information – information about facts, events and
processes taking place in the surrounding world; always explicit and verbalized;
- content-conceptual information conveys to the reader the author’s
understanding of relations between the phenomena described by means of
content-factual information, understanding of their cause-effect relations,
importance in social, economic, political and cultural life of people including
relations between individuals. This kind of information is deduced from the
whole literary work and is a creative re-understanding of these relations, facts,
events and processes; not always explicit;
- content-implicative information is hidden information that can be
deduced from content-factual information due to the ability of linguistic units to
generate associative and connotative meanings and also due to the ability of
sentences conveying factual information to acquire new meanings.
9) completeness – the text must be a complete whole;
10) modality – the attitude of the author towards what is being
communicated;
11) the author’s image – way the author’s personality is expressed in the
text.