A SENTENCE AS A TEXT: THE ASPECTS OF STYLISTICS AND SPEECH CULTURE

The article attempts to give a systematic explanation to a number of phenomena of text linguistics, syntax, stylistics and speech culture. The text is proposed to be considered as such a communicative unit of speech, which, from the point of view of content, is characterized by a semantic completeness, and from the point of view of form, by a separate design, i.e., by highlighting the text with spaces, headings and some other means. The function of the separate design is to inform the addressee about the need to find a semantic completeness in the speech product perceived by him. The proposed approach gives grounds to talk about the hierarchy of the structure of the text, which may include smaller components (parts, chapters, and finally paragraphs). These components have a separate design, a relative semantic completeness and, as a consequence, also are texts. Based on the proposed approach to the text, the minimum size text should be considered to be a sentence. The qualification of sentences as minimal texts makes it possible to explain a number of well known facts from a common position. Thus, the textual nature of a sentence explains the reasons why the authors of official texts tend to design any legally independent component of a business document in the form of one (often quite cumbersome) sentence; gives an answer to the question why if the author wants to express the increased communicative significance of any component of a message, it can be framed as a separate sentence and vice versa, why the reduced communicative significance of a message is expressed by its design as a part of a complex or compound sentence.