Germanic tradition of text linguistics: from text as a “supraphrasal unit” to a prototypical text

The Germanic tradition of text linguistics in the late 1960s and early 1970s treats text as an object of grammar, as a “supraphrasal unit”, and investigates linguistic means that link sentences to make a text. Since text is primarily meaning, the grammatical analysis of text is supplemented by semantic models of text and the communicative functional approach to text foregrounds the text function and the cognitive aspects of text. Representatives of modern Germanic text linguistics see text as a multi-layered phenomenon with situational-functional and structural-linguistic features, which is part of larger communicative units, i. e. discourses. From the very beginning of the formation of text linguistics the question of what text is has been asked. Besides the criteria of textuality listed by R. A. de Beaugrande and W. Dressler (1981) (i. e. cohesion, coherence, intensionality, acceptability, informativeness, situationality and intertextuality) modern Germanic text linguistics also distinguishes the unity of text style, cultural bias, type of code, mediality, materiality, and locality. Discussions about what the text is caused the emergence of the concept of prototypical text. Strict boundaries between text and non-text disappear, phenomena with more or fewer features of textuality are discussed