Communication and Text Linguistics: A Comprehensive Guide
Communication and Text Linguistics
What is Communication?
Communication is a process where a sender transmits a message to a recipient with various intentions, such as conveying information and establishing, maintaining, or changing social relations. The primary communication system used by humans is language, also known as natural language. Language has diverse manifestations, all of which we refer to as language.
Elements of Communication
The key elements involved in communication are:
- Participants: The sender (transmitter) and the receiver.
- Message: The information being conveyed.
- Environment: The physical and social context.
- Communicative Situation: The specific circumstances surrounding the communication.
In the communication process, a sender intentionally creates and sends a message, and a receiver receives and interprets it, recognizing the sender’s purpose within the communicative situation or context. Both participants possess communicative competence, enabling them to produce and understand messages and differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable ones.
Communicative Competence
Communicative competence encompasses:
- Linguistic Competence: Knowledge of the language, allowing the speaker to express themselves clearly and understand messages grammatically. It also helps identify unacceptable messages that violate syntactic, semantic, and phonetic rules.
- Pragmatic Competence: The ability to produce and understand messages appropriate to the communicative situation.
- Knowledge of the World: Extralinguistic knowledge related to the other participants and the topics discussed in the communication.
Message and Medium
The message is a sign or a group of signs. A sign combines a physical signal (e.g., sound or image) with an associated concept. Signs are transmitted through a specific medium or channel (oral, written, printed, radio, television, computer network, etc.).
Every sign has two elements:
- Signifier: The physical signal perceived through the senses.
- Signified: The concept associated with the signifier.
Characteristics of Linguistic Signs:
- The relationship between the signifier and the signified is not inherently motivated; it is conventional and must be learned.
- Human language uses signs transmitted through sound waves, utilizing an oral-auditory channel. This is why human language is also called oral language.
- Written forms of language have also been developed, leading to mass media.
Text and its Properties
What is a Text?
The text is the largest unit of linguistic communication. While a text can technically consist of a single statement, it typically refers to complex messages with various relationships between their components.
Characteristics of a Text
From a communication perspective, a text is characterized by:
- Intentionality: Language reflects the conscious purpose of a sender in a specific communicative situation.
- Adequacy: The text is appropriate for the communicative situation.
- Coherence: The text’s content is logically connected and unified.
- Cohesion: The text’s elements are formally linked, contributing to its coherence.
Coherence and Cohesion
Coherence ensures the unity of the text’s content, allowing the receiver to synthesize all its content into a single idea. This is achieved when the different ideas within a coherent text relate to each other to form a more general idea, which is the overall content of the text.
Cohesion is achieved through formal linguistic mechanisms that help the receiver establish relationships between the different parts of the text. Cohesion contributes to coherence by providing an organization and internal order to the text. Examples of cohesive devices include recurrences, proformas, substitutions, and textual markers.
Discourse Markers
Discourse markers are linguistic units that establish relationships between the various constituents of a text. They can be classified into:
- Connectors: Indicate semantic relations between successive units, such as temporal, spatial, additive, contrastive, or cause-and-effect relations.
- Speech Operators: Introduce a textual unit and guide its interpretation, providing information about the topic, perspective, spatial and temporal framework, etc.
- Textual Organizers: Affect the layout of the text and arrange different parts of the text or a textual sequence.
Text Classification
Texts can be classified based on various criteria:
- Semantic Criteria: Based on the meaning and purpose of the text.
- Structural Criteria: Based on the organization and structure of the text.
- Communicative Intent: Based on the sender’s purpose in creating the text.
- Means of Transmission: Based on the channel used to transmit the text (e.g., oral, written, electronic).
Text Types Based on Communicative Intent
- Informative Texts: Aim to convey information (e.g., scientific articles).
- Persuasive Texts: Aim to influence the receiver’s ideas, opinions, or values (e.g., propaganda, advertisements).
- Directive Texts: Aim to regulate the receiver’s behavior (e.g., laws, instructions).
- Literary Texts: Aim to create an aesthetic effect (e.g., poems, novels).
- Playful Texts: Aim to entertain (e.g., jokes, riddles).
Text Types Based on Structure
- Narrative Texts: Present a series of actions logically and chronologically ordered.
- Descriptive Texts: Describe an object or phenomenon, highlighting its properties.
- Explanatory Texts: Provide a solution to a problem or explain a concept.
- Argumentative Texts: Offer a justification for a thesis or claim.
Discourse Domains
Texts can also be classified based on their social function and domain, such as academic, legal, political, media, literature, daily life, and entertainment.