Text Features and Properties: Adequacy, Coherence, and Cohesion
Text Features and Properties
When we write, we rarely use isolated sentences. Instead, we connect sentences to convey a message and intent. While a single sentence can convey meaning, a higher unity, the text, offers a complete sense.
A text is any linguistic structure whose statements have a sense of unity and transmit a complete report. For a text to act as a communication unit, enabling the receiver to understand its meaning and intention, it must meet three conditions, also known as text properties: adequacy, coherence, and cohesion.
Text and Communicative Situation
A text is considered adequate if it conforms to the communicative situation. Several factors influence this:
- Relationship between partners: Determined by social and cultural relations (age, gender, sociocultural background, personality, etc.). The text’s form varies depending on whether the sender addresses a single or multiple receivers, colleagues, or family members. The sender’s communicative competence, the ability to select appropriate registers for each speech act, is crucial.
- Sender’s communicative intent: The sender may aim to refer to objective reality, express feelings, or elicit a specific reaction. These intentions should be apparent through language functions: representative, expressive, appellative, phatic, and poetic.
- Environment or situation: The circumstances surrounding textual creation determine the text type and mode of expression.
Coherence of the Text
A text provides a coherent global sense, recognizable to the receiver. To achieve this, parts must connect with a sense of unity. Through consistency, different ideas are arranged so the receiver perceives a significant unit (the subject) and its internal development (information provided on the subject).
Coherence is based on universal standards of expression: logical thinking, clarity, semantic consistency, and lexical variety. However, these principles can be suspended for specific effects.
The coherence of a text is achieved by considering the following:
- The text should not include absurd or unacceptable statements.
- Ideas known to the receiver need not be explicitly stated, avoiding empty sentences and focusing on information content.
- Common knowledge should not be contradicted (e.g., “Africa is in northern Europe”).
- As the text is complete, the receiver is assumed to remember what has emerged and repetition should be avoided.
- Prior knowledge of the receiver should be considered to clarify necessary information.
The most frequent causes of inconsistency in a text are: chaotic presence of multiple themes, contradictions, premature explanations, absence of a central theme, unnecessary repetition, semantic incompatibility of words, lack of coherence between parts, and inadequate expression for the scope and purpose.
Organization of the Text
Text organization involves:
- Unity: Integration of all statements around a central idea.
- Dynamism: Progression of statements and ideas. New information should appear on the main theme. This can occur by:
- Maintaining a constant theme with varied information.
- Referring to other issues, making the new part of the former.
- Linking issues that share common information.
- Cohesion: Language resources connecting ideas (recurrence, substitution, ellipsis, textual markers).
Text organization also includes content distribution in sections (caption, chapter, act, verse, etc.) and paragraphs. A paragraph is a closely related set of sentences structured around a central theme, contributing to the progression of the theme and meaning.
Cohesion of the Text
Cohesion, essential for coherence, consists of linguistic elements marking relations between sentences. Cohesion resources connect sentences, paragraphs, and chapters.
Recurrence
Recurrence is the repetition of an element within a text to maintain consistency and cohesion. Lexical repetition reinforces key ideas. In poetic texts, phonic recurrence (rhyme, syllables, accents) marks the rhythm.