Co wiedziała retoryka o budowie tekstu?
What did rhetoric know about the construction of text?

Summary/Abstract: This article attempts to answer the question about the extent to which the achievements of ancient rhetoric may be viewed as anticipating the research on the structure of coherent utterance (piece of communication). Research of this type evolved into a separate discipline, referred to as ‘theory of text’ (or, text linguistics), in the middle of the twentieth century; in parallel, there was a marked wave of renewed interest in rhetoric. Gindin discusses present-day relationships between the disciplines in question and proposes a systematic analysis of rhetorical concepts within the three constitutive domains: elocutio, dispositio, and inventio. The historical survey of the trends in the teaching of the art of rhetoric includes ancient Greek and Roman treatises, works by Indian and Chinese authors, the mediaeval ars dictaminis, and M.V. Lomonosov’s original expansion upon rhetoric ideas. The question posed in the title is answered negatively, with thorough arguments given in support of such a stance. The author primarily points out to the atomising approach that is characteristic of rhetoric across the levels of its theory, and emphasises that the latter has not proposed a general category of text as a cohesive communicative unit with an supra-genre reach that would work above the sentence level. However, archetypes of categories and structures characteristic of textual theory are discernible in the rhetorical canon. For instance, composition patterns of orations or letters might have become a point of departure for developing the general notion of macrostructure. Exemplary convergences of ancient ideas as well as some independently developed modern text analysis methods are quoted with a view to confirming the value of certain rhetorical concepts

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