اللسانيات النصية: جذورها، ونَشْأَتها، وملامح تطورها في التراث اللغوي العربي

Abstract

Text linguistics emerged to address the shortcomings of sentence linguistics, which focused solely on the sentence, treating it as a closed linguistic structure completely isolated from its social context. This approach rendered it incapable of encompassing the various semantic and pragmatic functions arising from communication, and even unable to explain how meaning is constructed through the sequence of sentences within a text.

This article, therefore, presents the concept of text linguistics as a modern linguistic approach that transcends the sentence to analyze the structure of the entire text. It then traces its development in the West, beginning with its initial stages and culminating in an examination of the contributions of Harris, Van Dijk, and Beaugrande, who are credited with laying its epistemological foundations and establishing its principles.

 The article also attempts to point out that text linguistics actually intersects with what we find in our Arabic linguistic heritage, in the works of many linguists such as Al-Jahiz, Ibn Jinni, Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, and others, who addressed numerous textual phenomena—rhetorical, grammatical, and syntactic—within scattered pragmatic studies that did not reach the level of a fully-fledged theory, unlike what we find in modern studies.