Pragmatic Criteria for Linguistic Examination of Expository Text

The paper introduces a pragmatic interpretation for linguistic examination of an expository text: the expertise involves functional assessment of the contribution of various linguistic textual components to the implementation of its (perlocutionary) tasks within the framework of educational communication. The elucidation is exemplified by the analysis of linguistic means that implement the task of programming the interpretation of the expository text by the addressee. The article characterizes the means-signals that enable expressing the relationships between the structural components of the text, which is considered with reference to three aspects of text formation: information structure, coherence, and modus plan. In the aspect of information structure, the means of thematic perspective organization and focus expression are considered; in the aspect of coherence – coreferential expressions and markers of logical relations; in the aspect of modus plan – metatextual constructions and introductory modal components of sentences. The undertaken pragmatic analysis of the signal means has enabled the assessment of their communicative role. The nonoptimal use of signal means is shown to cause such an interpretation of the text, when the relations between its structural components cannot be established correctly. The analysis of negative linguistic material (the cases of expressing ambiguous relations between the textual components) resulted in substantiating a linguistic criterion for a good expository text. A good expository text sets a model of its interpretation with the help of linguistic means that express the relations between its structural components and thereby allow the student to recognize and determine these relations. In linguistic evaluation, this criterion can be viewed as an assessment parameter: how adequately, accurately, relevantly and explicitly the relations between its structural components are expressed in the expository text.