Text units with purpose semantics in a discursive perspective

INTRODUCTION. The correlation of the terms “text units” and “discourse units” is currently opaque due to numerous approaches to defining text units and ambiguous decisions regarding discursive ones. The aim is to identify the features of the correlation of structural units of text and discourse and to establish the specifics of the rhetorical relations of Purpose at the element node level of discourse.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The research is conducted on the basis of contemporary mass media material through an unselected sampling from interviews with Russian political leaders using the methodology of the theory of rhetorical structures, general philological argumentation, as well as conversation and discourse analysis.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. A structural-semantic dependence is established when identifying the correlation of text units with the purpose semantics and discursive units organized according to the principle of rhetorical relations of the purpose; the specificity of the rhetorical connections of Purpose as relations of the subject type, an asymmetric structure, characterized by a complete paradigm of the signs of polarity and direction is revealed.CONCLUSION. The study has prospects for further study of global structures of natural discourse, as well as practical significance in the context of computational linguistics in the development of algorithms for creating texts using artificial intelligence.