On Methodology in Document Text Studies

The article characterizes the document text as an object of linguistic studies by distinguishing its polycoded specificity, dynamism, changeability, extralinguistic predetermination. It generalizes discussions on top issues grouped around a composition-and-discursive organization of some document types, their language unit consistency and categories. It considers the processes of text composing and perceiving in accordance with the communicative situation, social-and-cultural orientation, disparity between the document text and other text types. It determines linguistic methods for the document-text-oriented studies, including descriptive, semantic, functional-and-semantic, discursive, pragmatic, categorical-and-textual analyses, structural comparison, field structure modeling, semantic differential searching, psycholinguistic experiments. The growth of business-oriented communication areas, usage of Internet technologies for information delivery and blurring the normative borders between various types or subsystems of documents, as well as document function modification in modern social environment are stated to have sharpened the study aims and renewed discussions on genre definition of the document or efficient methodology in distinguishing genre reference of some new text samples. In the document-oriented linguistics the complex of discursive and linguistic methods is thought to be efficient in designating genre reference of the document texts as its multipurpose steps and stages allow for defining the text position through its function in the general document-oriented typology, and also verifying specificity of the document text composition, diverse verbal strategies in text organization. The samples of research results at the Volgograd State University are offered in order to prove that a step-by-step introduction of various methods unlocks the way to genre features distinction and genre parameters setting which enables general pragmatic assessment of the document type, the methods of semantic topics identification and group type setting, followed by stylistic analysis, highlight discursive particularity of the document text. The suggested complex methodology opens the way to presenting multispectral scientific assessment of the document genre via the parameters-assisted analysis that widens general knowledge about the document text profile in modern linguistics.