The report examines the trend in the development of linguistic studies, traces the main stages of the formation of linguistics. Structuralism, generative grammar, cognitive linguistics, and pragmatics are considered in relation to the view of these linguistic directions on the language structure. Hermeneutics, the science of text interpretation, has a similar development vector. At the present stage, postmodern discourse is replaced by meta-modernist fragments of discursive practices. The" structure "of a work of art, which has different forms of realization in different historical epochs, is replaced by the "structure of feeling", an emotive component that metaphorically conveys the variants of structuring a modern literary text.