Text Linguistics: Understanding Discourse and Properties
Text Linguistics or Grammar of Discourse
Item 4: Text Linguistics or Grammar of Discourse
Arising in the 1970s, text linguistics takes the text, the entire message of the communication process, as the unit of linguistic analysis and communication.
Main contribution: The studies in text linguistics (TL) are a recent and invaluable contribution to language teaching. This contribution is summarized in the assertion of the insufficiency of grammatical knowledge relating only to nouns and phrases, and the need to incorporate knowledge about the comprehensiveness of the text in TL teaching. With TL, various aspects are studied consciously: discourse organization, forms of cohesion, various text types, comprehension and production mechanisms of messages, social conventions for each communication, etc.
Concept of Text
In the modern sense, *text* means any complete verbal manifestation that occurs in communication. Texts can be oral or written, literary or not; to read or listen to; to say or write; long or short, etc. There is an important definition by Bernárdez (1982) that says: “Text is the fundamental linguistic communicative unity, a product of human verbal activity. It is characterized by its semantic and communicative closure and coherence… formed from the speaker’s communicative intention of creating a complete text and from its structure.”
Besides, this definition highlights three key ideas about the text:
- The text has a communicative character: it is an action or activity performed with a communicative purpose. Text processing is an activity like gymnastics or cooking a chicken in the oven, and it is also a process of communication like watching a movie or a painting.
- The text has a pragmatic character: it is produced in a concrete situation. Texts are inserted in a given situation, with partners, objectives, and constant references to the surrounding world, and have no meaning outside this context.
- The text is structured: it has an order and its own rules. Texts also have a very precise internal organization with rules of grammar, punctuation, and coherence, ensuring the meaning of the message and the success of communication.
One last definition of text is from the Soviet theorist Jurij M. Lotman (1979). For him, the text is “any communication that has taken place in one system of signs: ballet, theater, poetry, or painting.”
A word very close to *text*, and sometimes used with a similar meaning, is *discourse*. In colloquial usage, it refers to an oral exposure, more or less formal. In a more technical, linguistic acceptance, discourse is a sample, usually oral, to be analyzed.
Textual Properties
Textual properties are all the requirements that any verbal statement must comply with to be considered a text and to vehicle the message in a process of communication. There are six textual properties:
- Adequacy (dialect and register)
- Coherence (of the information or content)
- Cohesion (the connections between sentences)
- Grammar (of the formation of sentences)
- Presentation (of the execution of the text)
- Stylistics (of the literary or rhetorical devices used)
These six properties comprise the set of features or verbal rules that a text must have to act as a message in communication. Moreover, these six sections relate to the same reality, the text, and only make sense in their overall package.