Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка для студентов

“Principles of Pragmatics” (1983)
the scholar describes three 
principles of interpersonal rhetoric (the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness 
Principle, the Irony Principle) and four principles of textual rhetoric (the 
Processibility Principle, the Clarity Principle, the Economy Principle and the 
Expressivity Principle).

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Lecture 18
Text as an Object of Research. The Problem of the Text Unit 
1.
Text as an object of linguistic research.
2.
Cohesion and coherence. 
3.
Textual categories. 
4.
Textual units. The supra-phrasal unity and the paragraph. 
1. Text as an Object of Linguistic Research 
The text is a unit of language in use. It applies to any passage, spoken or 
written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole – a semantic unit. The 
text is the object of studies of the branch of linguistics called text linguistics. Text 
lingustics 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. Its original aims lay in uncovering 
and describing text grammars. The application of text linguistics has, however, 
evolved from this approach to a point in which text is viewed in much broader 
terms that go beyond a mere extension of traditional grammar towards an entire 
text. 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 
in an interactional, communicative context. Both the author of a (written or 
spoken) text as well as its addressee are taken into consideration in their respective 
(social and/or institutonal) roles in the specific communicative context. In general 
it is an application of linguistic analysis at the much broader level of text, rather 
than just a sentence or word. 
Despite the fact that there are many publications devoted to problems of text 
linguistics, there does not exist an adequate definition of the text that would find 
satisfaction with all researchers. The difficulties that arise when trying to work out 
a universally acceptable definition of the text can be explained by the fact that 

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scholars study the text in its various aspects: grammatical, stylistic, semantic, 
functional and so on.
The text can be studied as a product (text grammar) or as a process (theory 
of text). The text-as-a-product approach is focused on the text cohesion, coherence, 
topical organization, illocutionary structure and communicative functions; the text-
as-a-process perspective studies the text production, reception and interpretation.
Text 
can be understood as an instance of (spoken or written) language use 
(an act of parole), a relatively self-contained unit of communication. As a 
‘communicative occurrence’ it meets seven