Text Linguistics
With all the books and writings so manyfolded and spread across the world, has anybody ever wondered what a text is? Early on children start reading and writing. At school they call it text reading or text comprehension, which everybody accepts but nobody ever questions. I did not either, until April 2001. Within the course Linguis-tics and Poetics I chose to talk about the definition of text and suddenly I wondered what that was - four letters forming the one word, TEXT.
In this paper I want to go where several scholars have gone before. I want to discuss questions like: What part of linguistics devotes time and effort to text defini-tions? Where lie its origins? What is a text, and last but not least, what do people do with a text? Books to answer these questions are available at large by now and a chosen number of twelve shall help me to uncover the answers to those aforemen-tioned questions as I go along.
This paper is to be written within the framework of linguistics, a field analyzing specific language structures such as phonemes, morphemes and words. Apart from those, though, it also covers syntactic (e.g. noun- or verb phrases) and semantic structures (e.g. sememes). When working on textual structures, scholars enter the field of text linguistics. For Teun van Dijk this means: "any work in language science devoted to the text as the primary object of inquiry." (De Beaugrande 1981: 14)
The origins of text linguistics lie in Ancient Greece and Rome. Back then it was called rhetorics. Its focus was, for instance, on how ideas could be arranged and with which appropriate expressions. In the 1960s, a text was regarded as one unit larger than a sentence, and in the ′70s different types of text structures were discovered and classified. Those were the days when only few researchers were familiar with text studies, whereas nowadays a large number of works is available. Today a text is more likely to be seen as something that consists of well-formed sentences in sequence.
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Table of Contents
- Text Linguistics
- What is a TEXT?
- The Term TEXT and Scholars
- The Concept of Text
- Text or Part of a Text?
- Word Processing
- Text Analysis
- Finale
- Text Sorts
- Text Production & Text Topic
- Text Mood & Interpretation Levels
Objectives and Key Themes
This paper aims to explore the concept of "text" within the framework of linguistics, examining its definition, origins, and application. It delves into the historical development of text linguistics, contrasting various scholarly perspectives on what constitutes a text, and explores the role of textuality in communication.
- Defining the term "text" and its various interpretations within linguistics
- Tracing the historical evolution of text linguistics from ancient rhetoric to contemporary research
- Analyzing the characteristics of a text, including its structure, coherence, intentionality, and intertextuality
- Examining the relationship between text, language, and communication
- Exploring the role of text analysis in understanding the meaning and purpose of texts
Chapter Summaries
- Text Linguistics: Introduces the topic and sets the context for the paper, outlining the scope of the inquiry and the specific questions to be addressed. It emphasizes the importance of text linguistics within the broader field of language science, emphasizing its focus on the text as the primary object of study.
- What is a TEXT?: Presents a concise and multifaceted exploration of the definition of "text," highlighting the challenges and complexities inherent in understanding its multifaceted nature. The chapter examines various scholarly approaches to defining a text, analyzing their strengths and limitations.
- The Term TEXT and Scholars: Delves deeper into the ongoing debate surrounding the definition of "text," examining different scholarly perspectives on its characteristics and boundaries. It explores the views of key figures like Roland Barthes, Koch, Dressler, and Klein, showcasing their contributions to the understanding of textuality.
Keywords
This paper explores core concepts in text linguistics, focusing on the definition of "text," textuality, text analysis, and the history and development of the field. It examines the role of text linguistics in understanding the structure, meaning, and purpose of communication in both written and spoken forms.
- Quote paper
- Silke-Katrin Kunze (Author), 2001, What is a TEXT?, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/4291
