Procedural approach to understanding a text considering its composition – as exemplified by the beginning of H. Sienkiewicz’s “Ogniem i mieczem”
For linguistic and rhetoric analysis of the beginning of the novel indicated in the title the author implemented such notions from the world of text as event, agent, action, tool, recipient of the action, time and other taken from “Introduction to Text Linguistics” by R.-A. de Beaugrande and U. Dressler and “Human Information Processing” by P. A. Lindsay and D. A. Norman. The approach to understanding a text referred to here as procedural transpired to be useful for describing and explaining text phenomena at the lexical, syntactical and compositional levels. Procedural control centre for a given text, which is a temporal notion of a “year”, has also been confirmed by a rhetoric analysis of the composition of the novel’s beginning.