Text Genres and Types: A Comparative Analysis of Structural-Semantic and Functional-Pragmatic Classification

Abstract

Text is regarded in modern linguistics as a complex and multicomponent linguistic unit representing the highest level of communicative activity. A text is not merely a sequence of grammatically connected sentences, but a system organized semantically, structurally, and pragmatically. The classification of texts is one of the central problems of text linguistics, and structural-semantic and functional-pragmatic approaches play a particularly important role in this field. The structural-semantic classification is based on the internal content organization and semantic structure of the text, whereas the functional-pragmatic classification considers the communicative purpose and the author’s intention as the primary criteria. This article provides a comparative analysis of text types and categories based on both approaches, explains the characteristics of informative, explanatory, and argumentative texts on scientific grounds, and identifies the interrelation between these classifications. The results of the study indicate that structural-semantic and functional-pragmatic approaches reflect different aspects of the text while functioning as complementary scientific models.