Main concepts of text linguistics

Main contributors
Robert-Alain de Beaugrande
Robert-Alain de Beaugrande was a text linguist and a discourse analyst, one of the leading figures of the Continental tradition in the discipline. He was one of the developers of the Vienna School of Textlinguistik (Department of Linguistics at the University of Vienna), and published the seminal Introduction to Text Linguistics in 1981, with Wolfgang U. Dressler. He was also a major figure in the consolidation of critical discourse analysis.
Application to language learning
Text linguistics stimulates reading by arousing interest in texts or novels. Increases background knowledge on literature and on different kinds of publications. Writing skills can be improved by familiarizing and duplicating specific text structures and the use of specialized vocabulary.
Text is the unit of the highest (supersyntactic) level. It can be defined as a sequence of sentences connected logically and semantically which convey a complete message. The text is a language unit and it manifests itself in speech as discourse. Text linguistics is concerned with the analysis of formal and structural features of the text. Text linguistics takes into account the form of a text, but also its setting, i.e. the way in which it is situated in an interactional, communicative context.Text as a linguistic unit has become an object of analysis in different linguistic disciplines known as “text linguistics”, “text grammar”, “discourse grammar”. Being a linguistic unit, it is understood as a unity of the plane of expression (form) and the plane of content (meaning) and as such possesses certain properties known as text categories. The “category” is understood as both any generalized characteristics of a group of units and a group of units possessing some common essential properties. The number and taxonomy of text categories differ from linguist to linguist and often involve argument as to whether the meaningful and structural (formal) categories should be identified separately. The latter causes quite a problem as they are closely interrelated: structural categories have meaningful characteristics and semantic categories are revealed through formal structural features. The properties often discussed as