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Keywords: text, utterance, discourse, text linguistics, textology, text autonomy, discourse analysis, text as a process
Abstract
Contemporary text linguistics once again faces the necessity to ask itself a question about the object of its study. The reason for it is the existence of new definitions of text in which text is understood as a process and not as a product, as well as the developing studies of discourse and its social, political, cultural, and ideological determinants. In the present article I attempt to defend the traditional understanding of text as a product, not at the same time negating the necessity of studying communicative and pragmatic processes of discourse determinants. In order to achieve this I use three concepts which, when treated as different aspects of the same phenomenon, may help to grasp the complex object of text linguistics, which is text treated holistically as an integral phenomenon generated in the process of language communication embedded in a broad cultural context. These three concepts which I treat as a unity, and at the same time as three aspects of defining the object of text linguistics are: text, utterance, and discourse.
Since the 1970s, i.e. the time when text linguistics began to develop as a separate branch of linguistics, it has been possible to observe the widening of the scope of investigation of this discipline. This has recently been a subject of discussion of various Polish researchers, some of their views are, therefore, worth recalling. Jerzy Bartminf ski (2005: 47) sees modern textology as a common ground for linguists and literary researchers, which opens a prospect for the integration of the whole philological discipline. In his other works (Bartminski 1998 as well as Bartminski, Niebrzegowska-Bartminska 2009: 12-13) the scholar also advocates a broad scope of textology, indicating that it encompasses all the detailed aspects of text. It may therefore be divided into a number of branches: theoretical textology (text theory), descriptive textology, and applied textology (practical). The first branch focuses on studying suprasentential units, which are able to function independently in the process of communication. The aim of the second branch - descriptive textology - is to study the structure, semantics, and pragmatics of concrete texts, and carry out their analysis and interpretation with the help...