28. Textual Categories.

The textual category is a property characterizing every text, in other words, it is a typological feature of a text. Textual categories appear and function only in the text as a language unit of the highest rank. It is important to remember that the text is never modeled by one textual category but always by a totality of categories. It is sometimes regarded as a total of categories.

Today the list of textual categories is open: linguists name different textual categories because they approach the text from different angles.

The most commonly identified textual categories include:

1) divisibility – the text can be divided into parts, chapters and paragraphs dealing with specific topics, therefore having some formal and semantic independence;

2) cohesion – formal connectedness;

3) coherence – internal connectedness (integrity, according to I. R. Galperin);

4) prospection (flash-forward) – anticipation of future events;

5) retrospection (flash-back) – return to events in the past;

(Both prospection and retrospection break the space-time continuum of the text.)

6) anthropocentricity – the Man is the central figure of any text independent of its specific theme, message and plot;

7) conceptuality – any text has a message. Expressing some idea, that is, conveying a message is the basis of any creative work;

8) informativity

Prof. I. R. Galperin whose book on the text and its categories is one of the most authoritative and often quoted ones identifies three types of information:

- content-factual information – information about facts, events and processes taking place in the surrounding world; always explicit and verbalized;

- content-conceptual information conveys to the reader the author’s understanding of relations between the phenomena described by means of content-factual information, understanding of their cause-effect relations, importance in social, economic, political and cultural life of people including

relations between individuals. This kind of information is deduced from the whole literary work and is a creative re-understanding of these relations, facts, events and processes; not always explicit;

- content-implicative information is hidden information that can be deduced from content-factual information due to the ability of linguistic units to generate associative and connotative meanings and also due to the ability of sentences conveying factual information to acquire new meanings.

9) completeness – the text must be a complete whole;

10) modality – the attitude of the author towards what is being communicated;

11) the author’s image – way the author’s personality is expressed in the text.

29. Textual Units. Supra-Phrasal Unity and Paragraph.

One of prospective trends in modern text linguistics is describing such syntactic formations, or text units, identifying patterns according to which they are built and studying relations between them. Irrespective of their specific features, all text units are united by their common function – they represent the text as a whole integrally expressing the textual topic.

There is no universal agreement as to the term that should be used to describe text units. In the Russian tradition the following terms were used to refer to such formations: “phrase”, “strophe”, “prosaic strophe”, “component”, “paragraph”, “microtext”, “period”, “syntactic complex”, “monologue utterance”, “communicative bloc”, “complex syntactic unity”, “supra-phrasal unity”. The latter is the most commonly used one.

The supra-phrasal unity is a minimal text unit consisting of two or more sentences united by a common topic. In some cases the SPU can coincide with the text if it’s a short one, for example, a news item in the newspaper, a miniature story, etc. However, most commonly, the SPU is a component of a larger text. The SPU consists of at least two sentences, it is characterized by topical, communicative and structural completeness and the author’s attitude towards what is being communicated. The SPU is a complex semantic-structural unit, the communicative value of which does not equal the sum of meanings of its constituent sentences, it is a new semantico-structural formation.

It should be noted that sometimes it is not easy to delimit the boundaries of the SPU. In some cases it can coincide with the paragraph (this is especially typical of scientific papers and business documents), while in others the paragraph can be easily divided into several SPUs, for example, in fiction and poetry.

In the first place, the supra-phrasal unity is essentially a feature of all the varieties of speech, both oral and written, both literary and colloquial. As different from this, the paragraph is a stretch of written or typed literary text delimited by a new (indented) line at the beginning and an incomplete line at the close.

In the third place, the paragraph in a monologue speech can contain more than one supra-phrasal unity and the supra-phrasal unity can include more than one paragraph.