Text Properties: Cohesion, Coherence, and Discourse Analysis
Text Properties
Text fitness refers to the characteristics of well-constructed texts from a communication perspective. Consistency is an inherent property from a semantic standpoint. Cohesion is the syntactic manifestation of coherence.
Function of language fitness: Texts are predominantly referential, expressive, or appealing. The choice depends on the issuer’s communicative intention. An appropriate choice of communication channel is conditioned by the situation, as is the code. The communicative situation requires the use of the Castilian language, excluding non-verbal codes.
Variety of Idioms: Cultured language, formal or colloquial register, and variety of discourse such as narrative, description, and exposition. Textual coherence creates global coherence. A text must have a core of vital information, which we call the matter. The idea that summarizes the meaning is crucial for understanding. The subject includes the author’s intention to produce discourse and their attitude.
Linear coherence: If the text is sufficiently long, the theme appears in different sequences of meaning or ideas. The concept of arithmetic progression is related to thematic unity and content structure. Each statement implies the above information and adds new information. Local coherence refers to the information between various statements and within each of its constituents. Syntactic and linguistic elements establish relationships of meaning. These elements must be consistent with each other.
Textual Cohesion
Textual cohesion is the network of relationships between different elements and formal mechanisms that provide overall consistency and linear ideas in a text.
Case: Recurrence
- Recurrence: Repetition of a linguistic element throughout the speech.
- Lexical recurrence: Repetition of a word in different statements.
- Semantic recurrence: Repeated appearance of terms related by meaning:
- Synonymy: Both terms have the same meaning.
- Antonyms: Relationship between words with opposite meanings.
- Hyperonymy: Refers to something that has already appeared previously, avoiding the same word.
- Hyponymy: The substitute word has a lesser semantic amplitude than the replaced word.
- Lexical semantic field: Words belonging to the same field.
- Syntactic recurrence: Repetition of the same syntactic construction in different parts of the text.
- Phonic recurrence: Repetition of certain series of phonemes in different parts of the text, the clearest example being rhyme.
Replacement
A language resource that provides textual cohesion is the use of pro-forms: occasional meaningless words or lexical meanings that generally specialize in replacing other terms in the discourse.
- Pronouns: Substitute for substantive discourse.
- Pro-adverbs: Adverbs with occasional meaning, replacing the statement.
- Lexical pro-forms: Words of wide meaning, used as wildcards.
Ellipsis
Some lexical elements of a sentence can be omitted if they have been featured in a previous speech.
The Order of Sentence Constituents
The word order is crucial for the cohesion of the text. Known information in a sentence precedes new information.
Discourse Markers
Discourse markers are linguistic elements that establish relations of ideas to the context and the communicative situation.
Pragmatic Function Markers
These are references to the elements of communication involved in the texts. They reveal the intention or attitude of the issuer or the recipient of the speech. For example, the recipient is the vocative and appeals, the channel refers to phatic elements, comments in a sentence inform the speaker’s attitude to the idea, and interjections manifest the speaker’s emotion.
Connectors and Supra-Oracionales
These relate sentences within a sentence.