1. Milestones of evolution of text linguistics.

Text linguistics – is a branch of linguistics which studies texts & their peculiarities.

The oldest form of preoccupation with texts can be found in rhetoric, dating from Ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages right up to the present (on the current resurgence of classical rhetoric). The traditional outlook of rhetoricians was influenced by their major task of training public orators. The main areas were usually the following: invention, the discovery of ideas; disposition, the arrangement of ideas; elocution, the discovery of appropriate expressions for ideas; and memorization prior to delivery on the actual occasion of speaking. In the Middle Ages, rhetoric belonged to the “trivium” (three studies) alongside grammar (formal language patterns, usually Latin and Greek) and logic (construction of arguments and proofs).

When modern linguistics began to emerge, it was customary to limit investigation to the framework of the sentence as the largest unit with an inherent structure. When we move beyond the sentence boundary, we enter a domain characterized by greater freedom of selection or variation and lesser conformity with established rules.

Literary studies

Texts have been a long-standing object of literary studies, though emphasis was limited to certain text types. Scholars have at various times embarked on tasks such as these:

• describing the text production processes and results of an author, or a group of authors in some time period or setting;

• discovering some problematic or contestable senses for texts;

• assigning values to texts.

Anthropology

Texts have also come under the scrutiny of anthropology in its explorations of cultural artifacts

Anthropological investigation of little-known cultures was massively supported by a linguistic method known as tagmemics.

Tagmemics

The method called for gathering and analysing data in terms of “slots” and “fillers”, i.e. according to the positions open within a stretch of text and to the units that can occupy those positions. Tagmemics looks beyond the boundaries of both sentences and texts toward such large complexes of human interaction as a football game or a church service.

The integration of anthropology and linguistics in the tagmemic approach has provided invaluable documentation of many rapidly disappearing languages in remote regions.

Sociology

Sociology has developed an interest in the analysis of conversation as a mode of social organization and interaction. For example, studies have been conducted on how people take turns in speaking.

ethnomethodology

The field entitled ethnomethodology inquiries into correlations between patterns of speaking and social roles or groups:

• how people adapt their language behaviour in certain group encounters;

• how speaking conventions are established or changed;

• how social dominances emerge in speaking; and so forth.

discourse analysis

The study of conversation, sometimes also called discourse analysis, is of vital import to a science of texts. The mechanisms which combine texts as single contributions into discourses as sets of mutually relevant texts directed to each other

Zellig S. Harris proposed to analyse the distribution of morphemes in texts according to “equivalences”: relationships in which elements were the same or had the same environments.

To increase the number of equivalences and thus to make analysis more exhaustive, Harris applied the notion of “transformation” that was later adopted and modified by his pupil Noam Chomsky.

Eugenio Coseriu’s study of “determination and setting” is based on entirely different considerations. He asserts that research on language demands the investigation not only of speakers’ knowledge of a language but also of techniques for converting linguistic knowledge into linguistic activity.

He then presents an elaborate classification of “settings” (“entornos”) based on such factors as cultural, social, cognitive, and historical surroundings, degree of mediation between text and situation, and range of content being addressed.

The first large-scale inquiry into text organization was contributed by Roland Harweg (1968).8 He postulated that texts are held together by the mechanism of “substitution” (one expression following up another one of the same sense or reference and thus forming a cohesive or coherent relationship)

An important notion which sets van Dijk’s work apart from studies of sentence sequences is that of macro-structure:16 a large-scale statement of the content of a text. Van Dijk reasoned that the generating of a text must begin with a main idea which gradually evolves into the detailed meanings that enter individual sentence-length stretches. When a text is presented, there must be operations which work in the other direction to extract the main idea back out again, such as deletion (direct removal of material), generalization (recasting material in a more general way), and construction (creating new material to subsume the presentation).