Abstract: The ever-increasing volume of scientific publications determines the high interest of researchers in abstracting as one of the ways to present the content of the source text in a concise form. This determines the relevance of this work, which discusses the problem of transition from the primary text to its abstract presentation. In particular, using the example of an English-language scientific article on social psychology, an attempt is made to study the criteria for identifying key semantic components in the process of abstracting at the stage of understanding the source text. A theoretical review of scientific papers covering the problem of abstracting a scientific text, as well as a comparative analysis of the source and secondary texts of the article under consideration, allowed us to formulate the main patterns of interpretation of the logical-semantic and discursive structure of the source text as one of the stages of the abstracting process. It was found that in the process of understanding the text, the recipient, analyzing the connections between statements, integrates them into a holistic semantic formation, based on his own assumptions about the possible functional purpose of this text fragment. At the end of the process of understanding the text, the recipient deduces knowledge about the communicative intention of the author of the text and the role of each of the sections of the text in its implementation. It seems that this knowledge becomes the basis for the formation of a propositional model of the source text, which serves as the basis for creating the text of the abstract.