Text Analysis: Properties, Cohesion, and User Attitude
Text and Its Properties
1. Concept of Text
A text is the maximum unit of linguistic analysis and communication, whether spoken or written. It’s a self-contained unit of any length. Texts vary by:
- Transmission Channel: Oral (instantaneous, dynamic, spontaneous) or written (prepared, organized, including images and typography).
- Intention: News, legal, persuasive (advertising), or aesthetic (literary).
- Structure:
- Narrative: Presents facts or fiction, using verbs, coordinate and subordinate structures.
- Descriptive: Represents real or fictitious things, using adjectives, nouns, comparisons, and metaphors.
- Expository: Develops themes clearly and orderly, using technical terms and rich vocabulary.
- Argumentative: Provides rationale for an opinion or claim, using wordplay and specific vocabulary.
2. Properties of Text
A text has an organizational structure of interrelated parts (statements/paragraphs). To be considered a text, it must satisfy certain properties:
2.1 Consistency
Consistency ensures the communication unit is received effectively. A text is coherent when there are significant connections between its elements, due to:
- Thematic Unit: A thematic focus organizes the propositions, including assumptions and implications.
- Thematic Progression: Each statement provides new, orderly, and hierarchical information.
- Setting: The type of text and situation affect consistency.
2.2 Cohesion
Cohesion reflects linguistic consistency, depending on grammatical relations that favor logical connections. Cohesion mechanisms include:
- Reference: Refers to an item without repetition, using anaphora or cataphora.
- Reiteration: Repeats an element using the same word, synonyms, or hyperonyms.
- Ellipsis: Omission of an element.
- Topicalization: Moves an item to the start, separated by a pause (e.g., “Time, that’s what I need”).
- Connectors: Logically connect elements, expressing addition, consequence, or counterargument.
- Deixis: Relates to who, where, when, and how.
- Isotopy: Repetition of linguistic units linked by form or meaning, common in poetry.
2.3 Fitness
Fitness adapts the text to the communicative situation, considering factors like language role, channel, recording, and linguistic/historical/cultural context. There are two environments:
- Location: Linguistic circumstances (space-time, physical/empirical reality, speech situation). A text can be appropriate or inappropriate.
- Context: Linguistic, historical, and cultural circumstances (verbal, linguistic, historical, and cultural contexts). Essential for explaining texts, especially those from different contexts.
2.4 User Attitude
Senders and recipients show tolerance for coherence and cohesion deficiencies. User attitude is determined by:
- Intention: The sender’s attitude, aiming for proper message transmission and reception, by adjusting planning, style, or order.
- Acceptability: The receiver’s attitude, helping maintain consistency through inferences.
2.5 Information Degrees
Relates to the novelty or unpredictability of the text for recipients. All texts are informative, but low information levels may cause rejection.
2.6 Intertextuality
Refers to relations with previous texts. Parodies or literary reviews have a high degree, requiring senders to refer to the original text and recipients to have prior knowledge.