Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Nino Kirvalidze
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from the functionalist viewpoint, a verbal unit of any length, be it a sequence of themati-
cally interrelated sentences, one simple sentence or even one single word can be defined 
as a text if it performs a communicative function. This definition explains the existence of 
such one-word texts as: “Fire!” “Help!” and many others, that are restricted by the context 
of the corresponding speech acts.
British scholar Halliday writes that text is language in use. It implies that text is a 
speech product whereas language exists as a system of virtual signs that represent building
material for the text. In other words, language system provides the speaker or the writer 
with abstract models by which they convert their ideas into a text. 
Text as a communicative verbal unit has its peculiar characteristics. Textual cha-
racteristics are first of all predetermined by a whole set of such factors as: the communi-
cants (comprising both - the addresser and the addressee), the text with the help of which 
they interact, the place and the time of the communication, the correspondence between 
the textual-world and the object-world of reality and so on. This means, that while ana-
lyzing a text, we should focus on the features that completely differ from lingual units 
proper. The set of all these and other similar extralinguistic characteristics has led to the 
development of pragmatics as an inseparable branch of communicative linguistics. At 
present, communicative linguistics and pragmatics represent two interdependent aspects 
of discourse analysis, be it conversations or written texts.
Text analysts claim that there are some grammatical and lexical regularities observ-
able in well-formed written texts that explain how the structuring of sentences has impli-
cations for units such as microtexts. The English grammar offers a limited set of options 
for creating surface links between the clauses and sentences of a text, otherwise known as 
text cohesion. 
According to Halliday and Hasan, most texts display links from sentence to sen-
tence in terms of such grammatical features as pronominalization, ellipsis and con-
junctions of various kinds. Texts displaying such cohesive features are easy to find. Let’s 
consider a microtext from the famous English novel “Jude the Obscure” by Thomas Hardy: 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof.