Підручник для студентів старших курсів

1.7. The categories of informativity, presupposition and segmentability in a scientific text.

• 
  Since the main functional-communicative aim of a scientific text is that of conveying purely intellective information, the category of informativity is confined to the factual information only.
  

• 
  Like in any functional variety of the language the volume of the factual information in a scientific text can be widened at the expense of some facts relevant in terms of another textlinguistic category, that of presupposition. As any scientific or humanities text is addressed to the specialist reader, the category of presupposition finds specific forms of expression, namely, through references, foot-notes and quotations.
  
• 
  In terms of the category of segmentability the structure of a scientific text can be described through two basic units of its logico-semantic divisibility – physical and conceptual paragraphs.
  
• 
  The conceptual paragraph within a scientific text may coincide with the corresponding physical paragraph marked on a page by spacing or indentation. But more often than not, the size of the conceptual paragraph extends across the boundaries of more than one physical paragraph, as several physical paragraphs may be united and held together by some common idea. So, the conceptual paragraph can be considered the main unit of the logico-semantic analysis of a scientific text as an integral structural-semantic whole.
  

1.8. The rhetorical organization of a scientific text. A scientific text is characterized by certain rhetorical organization which finds its expression in the use of various rhetorical patterns, i.e. functionally significant syntagmatic sequences expressed by general scientific units and closely associated with certain reasoning processes of scientific communication. Rhetorical patterns have been worked out by the language of science as the optimum stereotype forms of expression which serve to reflect certain recurrent types of content, on the one hand, and certain compositional stereotypes of a scientific text, on the other.

• 
  The following two main types of traditionally used rhetorical patterns can be distinguished in a scientific text: 1. those concerned with certain stages and procedures of scientific cognition as such and 2. those pertaining to the structural-compositional arrangement of a scientific text.
  
• 
  Rhetorical patterns connected with the process of scientific cognition comprise rhetorical patterns of definition, classification, generalization, experiment description, formulating a hypothesis and others.
  
• 
  Structural-compositional rhetorical patterns are expressed by general scientific units which serve as scientific text organizers for ordering and arranging different parts of scientific reasoning:
  

1.