Historical genre studies and the history of language: The place and role of text types in German and Russian historical linguistic research

Abstract

The article presents a critical analysis of both domestic and foreign works on text linguistics where researchers try to reveal a minimum classification unit. More specifically, the article focuses on the term “Textsorte”. While it is widely employed in German linguistics, its content is not clearly defined in the works of Russian and foreign scholars. Here, it is shown how the term is approached in different fields of research — in information aesthetics, semiotics, text theory, and historical linguistics. The article is aimed at assessing the potential certain text types, recorded in various periods of the life of language, have for an extended description of language history. The authors analyze texts of oral folklore, and namely charms. Therefore, works on the history and typology of folklore genres are taken into account and thoroughly reviewed. These are mainly linguistic genre studies and scrutinizing them provides an opportunity to touch upon problems pertinent to the research of text genres, to consider the discussion around “text genre” and “text type” in foreign and domestic linguistics, to define the place and role of given text types in historical linguistic and cultural studies, and to reveal both trends in researching folklore texts and the relationship of folklore with text linguistics. The authors come to the conclusion that a comprehensive description of a given text type allows one to formulate general principles of diachronically oriented research and make a significant contribution to the development of historical linguistics.