the author’s image – way the author’s personality is expressed in the
text.
4. Textual Units. Supra-Phrasal Unity and Paragraph Analyzing the structure of the text, linguists identify semantically connected
sentence sequences as certain syntactic formations. 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.
It should be noted that there are some scholars who do not recognize the
existence of linguistic units beyond the framework of the sentence. This opinion
can be explained by the lack of a complete systematic description of linguistic
peculiarities of such units.
The problem of text units has been addressed by numerous scholars both in
this country and abroad. Speaking about Russian linguists, we should mention the
works by I. R. Galperin, O. I. Moskalskaya, E. A. Referovskaya, Z. Ya. Turaeva,
G. Ya. Solganik and others. A new approach to the nature of the text was proposed
by Prof. Blokh, who introduced the notion of dicteme – the elementary topical
textual unit.
The
