TEXTUAL GRAMMAR GLOSSARY

Concepts

WORDING

The textual formal essence, the actual words, and their organisation in a text. The medium-independent form of a text.

TEXT

The non-structural, prototype category of a meaningful worded unit that is produced through a discourse.

CONNECTEDNESS

The notion of connectedness in a situated discourse refers to the way sentences combine so as to ensure that there is propositional development.

INFORMATIVITY

It concerns the extent to which the occurrences of the presented text are expected vs. unknown/uncertain.

INTERTEXTUALITY

The sum of the aspects of a text whose interpretation/utility is dependent on other texts previously encountered

SITUATIONALITY

All factors that that make a text relevant to a situation.

MEANINGFULNESS (textual)

A text´s characteristic of being a semantic unit, identified as a) being about a single topic/theme and b) being part of a greater discourse.

PROTOTYPE CATEGORY

Any category that is not defined on the basis of sufficient and necessary features in a binary fashion.

RELEVANCE

Within information theory it is the requirement that every utterance conveys information that is worth the addressee's effort to process it.

SENTENCE

The highest level of the structural hierarchy/rank.

FORM

In hierarchy/rank, it is defined as the immediately contained components within a constituent.

MEDIUM-INDEPENDENT FORM

The form of a text that does not depend on the material embodiment of a text, namely the actual wording.

MEDIUM-DEPENDENT

Formal elements of a text whose existence depends on the material embodiment of a text: intonation, pitch, gestures, pictures, hyperlinks, etc. are all elements whose existence and interpretative relevance depend on the medium.

FUNCTION

The role of a constituent within its immediate structural context, in other words within the immediately containing hierarchical level. For example, the function of an NP within a VP is that of an Object.

HIERARCHY/RANK

The structural relation that holds among the components of a sentence, defined relationally through immediate constituency.

EXPECTEDNESS

A receiver’s sense that a proposition meets the requirement that its content be naturally addressing the aboutness of the preceding proposition(s).

CO-REFERENCE

It is the property of two linguistic elements to refer to the same entity, either in the extralinguistic world (exophora) or in the text world (endophora).

PROPOSITIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The textual organisation that ensures that each proposition naturally follows the previous one, on the basis of given and new information.

DISCOURSE

The situated process of producing texts with a common general theme.

COHESION

It concerns the ways in which the components of the surface text, i.e. the actual wording we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence.

COHERENCE

It requires that the components of textual world, i.e. the configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text, are mutually accessible and relevant.

ABOUTNESS (textual)

The property of a text that it can be conceptually unified under a single textual theme.