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 Topics
This paper aims to explore the linguistic definition of a text by examining various scholarly perspectives and analytical frameworks. The primary goal is to determine what constitutes a text, how it is processed by the human mind, and how it can be analyzed using linguistic methods.
- Historical and contemporary definitions of a text
- The distinction between texts and text segments
- Mental processes involved in word and text comprehension
- Methodological approaches to structural text analysis
- The relationship between text sorts, production, and recipient reception
Excerpt from the Book
The Concept of TEXT
Wherever a discussion of texts is centered upon, it becomes clear that to the present no commonly accepted text definition is available, and one may wonder whether it is possible or useful at all to think of a definition that would enable scholars to determine what exactly could be called a text. What seems to be certain, though, is that a text can be divided into sub-texts, for, different components and their interrelations can be differentiated.
Furthermore, certain aspects in a sentence can only be understood and determined when looking at the whole text. An intention or subject of communication, for example, realizes itself in text elements and their relations, and when wanting to analyze them, the text just has to be broken down into its constituents. Those possible constituents are the macro - and micro structure of a text. The macro structure looks at how a text is structured in general (e.g. table of contents), whereas the micro structure is focusing on the common logic in a text, its coherence, as well as on the relationship between phrases, a text’s cohesion. This cohesion can be expressed by directly repeating a word or by using a pronoun instead, so that in an analysis the detection of cohesion seems to be rather easy. Not so a text’s coherence. To achieve coherence and to enable the reader to become aware of it, every author of a text should structure it in a way that the recipient can build up a coherent mental model for it.
Summary of Chapters
TEXT LINGUISTICS: Introduces the academic field dedicated to the scientific study of text structures and their origins.
WHAT IS A TEXT?: Explores the difficulties in finding a universal definition and discusses varying scholar opinions on text length and completeness.
THE TERM TEXT AND SCHOLARS: Analyzes specific definitions provided by linguists like Barthes, Koch, Dressler, and Klein.
THE CONCEPT OF TEXT: Discusses macro and micro structures, coherence, cohesion, and the role of the reader in building mental models.
TEXT OR PART OF A TEXT?: Investigates the boundary between independent texts and parts of larger works or cycles.
WORD PROCESSING: Examines how recipients use common knowledge and strategy to comprehend and interpret text meaning.
TEXT ANALYSIS: Describes practical methods for deconstructing texts, identifying propositions, and determining structural features.
FINALE: Provides an overview of text sorts, production motivations, and the importance of mood and interpretation levels.
TEXT SORTS: Categorizes various speech situations into distinct textual sub-systems with specific conventions.
TEXT PRODUCTION & TEXT TOPIC: Explains the motivations behind text creation and strategies for identifying the central subject.
TEXT MOOD & INTERPRETATION LEVELS: Addresses how texts evoke emotions and the multi-level process of interpreting meanings beyond simple word processing.
Keywords
Text Linguistics, Coherence, Cohesion, Macro structure, Micro structure, Text sorts, Word processing, Text analysis, Semantics, Pragmatics, Textual structure, Interpretation, Propositions, Communication, Mental model.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the primary focus of this paper?
The paper explores the definition and nature of a "text" within the framework of linguistics, investigating how texts are structured, processed, and analyzed.
What are the central thematic fields covered?
The work covers text linguistics, the distinction between text and speech, macro/micro structures, cognitive word processing, and methods of text analysis.
What is the core research objective?
The objective is to address the difficulty of defining "a text" and to explore how different scholars and analytical models approach the study of textual organization.
Which methodology is utilized in the paper?
The paper employs a comparative literature review approach, synthesizing theories from various linguists to provide a comprehensive overview of text definitions.
What topics are discussed in the main body?
The main body treats the history of text linguistics, the criteria for text completeness, cognitive strategies for understanding, and the practical deconstruction of texts into propositions.
Which keywords best characterize the work?
Core keywords include Text Linguistics, Coherence, Cohesion, Word Processing, Text Analysis, and Textual structure.
How does the author define a "text" in contrast to a single sentence?
The author discusses how, while some scholars accept one-word or one-sentence texts, their own conceptualization leans toward a broader, structuralist view of texts as sequences of interconnected units.
What role does the recipient play in text analysis?
The recipient plays a critical role by constructing a coherent mental model, using background knowledge to reconstruct the sender's intentions and interpret the text's functions.
- Quote paper
- Silke-Katrin Kunze (Author), 2001, What is a TEXT?, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/4291