(Category of Discourse) Discourse Categories

1)the broadest fundamental concept that reflects the most essential, natural connections and relationships between reality and cognition. Among the main categories are those of matter, motion, space, time, and others. As a result of the reflection of the objective world in the process of practical transformation, the category becomes a means of cognition and further transformation of reality[Beaugrande, Dressler 1981].

1)Text and discourse categories are interrelated: the former makes a meaningful basis of discourse[Beaugrande, Dressler 1981].
2)Discourse-constitutive categories differentiate text from non-text (relative structure, thematic unity, stylistic and structural integrity, and the relative semantic completeness); 2) genre-stylistic categories characterize texts in terms of their compliance with functional speech varieties (stylistic identity, genre canon, cliches, the degree of compression); 3) meaningful categories (semantic and pragmatic ones) reveal the meaning of the text (adresee, image of the author, informativity, modality, interpretability, intertextual orientation); 4) formal and structural categories organize texts (composition, segmentation, cohesion)” [Karasik 2002: 241]