Аннотация:As a sign formation, text is fundamentally heterogeneous and heterostructural. Since the times of classical rhetoric, three layers have been identified in the text: the object layer, the logical layer, and the language layer. Each had relative independence, which enabled them to be the subject of analysis in a special section of the rhetorical canon. These layers were characterized by their own descriptive logic and ways of processing the material. Sense configuration could proceed in three directions under the influence of three molecular structures of the text: language, logic, theme. Hence, the possibility of three ways of understanding: literal, conceptual and paralogical. However, writing allowed dialogue with the text ("conversation with a book"), i.e. interacting with it as with a subject of communication and trying to understand the sense of the text as of the one which carries the sense of its selfmeasure. The three ways of comprehension - the three semantic systems - must be coordinated, correlated to one another in order to appear as a semantic whole - the face of the text.