Specyfika listu handlowego jako przedmiotu badań lingwistyki tekstów specjalistycznych

The article draws closer the notion of a commercial letter as a means o f specialist communication, while the starting point for consideration is a proposal o f presenting a degree of expertness of various texts on a scale beginning from the most common, as for instance a conversation (cf. Boniecka 2009:151), through the whole spectre o f genres of greater and greater degree o f professional competence up to for example strictly expert discussion of two engineers of the building industry on the subject o f specificity of steel constructions. The concept of the scale (cf. Kalverkamper 1990) allows maintaining fluency in attributing to texts greater and greater degree o f professional competence, thus it does not force fixed divisions between particular genres because of the level of their expertness. While performing the very charactei i sties of the commercial letters, a pragmatic dimension comes to the fore, finding more and more supporters in the contemporary linguistics o f the text, particularly taking into consideration its situational and functional aspect (cf. Ga jda 2009: 139). The final part of the article constitutes a short outline concerning the condition o f research over the commercial letter as the specialist text mainly in the German, as well as in the Polish linguistics of the text.