3. Text linguistics

1.Text and text linguistics

What makes text a text?

→ text is used to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that forms unified whole, prose or verse, dialogue or monologue

  • communicative function → produced to achieve specific purposes

  • usually extends beyond single utterance

  • contextually sitauted

  • perceived as complete unit → has boundaries and internal unity

From sentence to text

Traditional linguistic analysis

  • focused to units up to sentence level

  • sentence viewed as largest unit of grammatical structure

  • text as collection of individual sentences (not unified whole)

Text linguistic perspective

  • sentences as components of larger textual structures

  • meaning emerges from relationship btw sentences

  • grammatical choices influenced by position within text

  • patterns of organisation extend across sentence boundaries

Key questions in text linguistics

2.Standards of textuality

Overview

De Beigrande and Dressler: Seven Standards of textuality

Text-centred standards:

  1. Cohesion:

    • surface structure of text must linguistically fit together grammatically/semantically (right sentence order)

    • creates continuity

  2. Coherence

    • content of text must be functionally connected

    • conceptual connectivity that creates unified meaning underneath surface text, more abstract

User-centred standards

  1. Intentionality

  • communicative goals, writer’s purpose

  1. Acceptibility

  • expectations reader has towards text (connectedness and relevance)

  1. Informativity

  • extent to which contents of text are new

  1. Situationality

  • text must be relevant in specific context

  1. Intertextuality

  • recipient has to have idea about characteristics of text genre/other texts

3.Coherence and cohesion

Comparison

Grammatical cohesion

Reference

  • personal reference, demonstrative reference, comparative refence

  • anaphoric vs. cataphoric reference

Substitution and ellipsis

  • avoiding repetitiion while maintaining textual connections

Conjunctions

  • additive conjunction (and)

  • adversative conjunction (because)

  • temporal conjunction (first, then)

Lexical cohesion

How

  • repetition

  • synonymy

  • hyponymy

  • collocation

  • expansion

  • condensation

  • lexical fields, same word class

  • lexical set (not necessarily same word class but association)

Cohesion =/ coherence

Coherent text: order and structure

  •  explicit: chapters, headings, sub-headings

  • implicit: using cohesive devices “textual glue”

  • meaningful thematic progression

4.Thematic progression

Theme and rheme

→ 2 complementary communicative functions of semantic components of statement, what is being communicated (topic) and what is being said about it (rheme)

→ Theme

  • what sentence is about

  • information producers take for granted

    • previously mentioned

    • world knowledge

    • clear from context

→ Rheme

  • what is said about theme

  • new information producer do not take for granted

Types

Danes: 5 types of thematic progression

1.Simple linear progression

  • rheme of one sentence bcomes theme of next one

  • e.g. Hannah bought a new car. The car was very expensive

2. Progression with constant theme

  • same theme appears in series of sentences with different rhemes

  • e.g. Jim loves cooking. He makes pasta. He baked bread

3.Progression with derived themes

  • themes derive from hypertheme

  • e.g. Our house needs work, The roof is leaking, The walls need painting

4.Development of split rheme

  • rheme contains multiple elements that become separate themes

  • e.g. They travelled to Lagos and Accra. Lagos was rainy. Accra was sunny

5.Progression with thematic leap

  • theme derived from previous rheme but not immediately preceding one

  • e.g. We visited a museum. The tour was fascinating. The paintings were impressive

5.Text types

Introduction

text type = idealizes norm of distinctive text structuring serving as deep structural matrix of rules/elements for encoder when responding linguisticallly to specific aspects of his experience

  • fundamental rhetorical patterns that structure information

  • based on communicative functions and linguistic features

  • relatively stable across languages/cultures

→ 5 types

Description

  • focus on depicting what is observed in space

  • rich descriptive adjectives

  • Highlight of noun phrases

  • existential sentences with “there”
    verbs of being and positioning

Narration

  • focus on events unfolding over time

  • strong verbs indicatinf change and action e.g. ran, go

  • temporal orientation through corresponding conjunctions

  • chronological sequence in past tense

  • adverbs indicating time

Exposition

  • focus on explaining concepts

  • abstract elements brought together

  • “it consitst of”, “we refer to”

  • synthetic or analytic approaches

  • focus on relationship and positions in nominal phrase

Argumentation

  • focus on evaluating and persuading

  • problem-solution structure

  • evaluative terminology

  • rhetorical questions with indirect function

  • supporting evidence presented with causal link

Instruction

  • focus on directing actions and behaviours

  • direct imperative forms

  • questions with imperative function

  • modals expressing obligation

  • sequential markers

  • specific handling specifications

Genre

= comprises class of communicative events which share communicative purposes, purposes recognized by expert member of community

→ constitute rationale for genre, shapes schematic structure of discourse and influences choice of content/style

  • users learn genre knowledge as they become competent users of discourse community (content, structure, form, language)

6.Register

Introduction

Register = variety associated with particular situation

→ 3 major components

  • situational context of use (including communicative purposes)

  • linguistic features (and analysis of words and structures commonly occuring)

  • functional relationship between two

→ Linguistic features always functional in registers

  • features occur bc they suit purpose/context

  • pervasive across text

Situation and linguistic features

Situational characteristics

  • participants: addressors, addressees, relationships

  • channel

  • mode, production circumstances

  • setting (time, place, shared context)

  • communicative purposes (functions, factuality)

Linguistic features

  • Lexico-grammatical features

    • word choice, vocabulary, grammatical structures

  • distribution patterns

    • frequency, co-occurence relationships

  • Functional associations

    • links to communicative purposes and situations

Biber’s Multidimensional analysis

→ Statistical technique for analysing co-occurence patterns of linguistic features

Benefits:

  • empirical foundation for register comparison

  • reveals clusters of registers with similar linguistic characteristics

  • connects linguistic patterns to communicative functions

  • provides quantitative measures of register differences

→ Application to various languages and historical periods