How Did Text Research Lead To Semiotic Textology?

The intention of this paper is to show how Semiotic Textology, the theory elaborated by the Hungarian linguist János Sándor Petőfi, can be considered the acme in the development of text research. In order to perform this task, firstly text research is presented and its historical genesis is shown. Secondly the disciplinary status of text linguistics is discussed. The development of text linguistics can be distinguished in three different periods: 1) the period of transphrastischen Untersuchungen (hereafter denominated "broader dimension sentence studies"), 2) the elaboration of text gram-mars; 3) the foundation of textual theories. Intersecting the second and the third period, a more comprehensive framework arises, within which all the relevant syntactic, semantic, pragmatic (i.e. semiotic) information involved in any human communication process can be dealt with. This theory is now called Semiotic Textology. Petőfi’s theoretical work has been an attempt to put the segnic object gen-erally called "text" at the centre of research activity and investigate the text through means of an always appropriate and intersubjectively verifiable methodology.