Text Types and Features: A Comprehensive Guide
Text Types and Features
Scientific Texts
Purpose: To discover the causes of natural processes based on valid and demonstrable truths.
Types:
- Scientific: Focuses on scientific concepts and theories.
- Technical: Describes practical applications of scientific concepts.
Features:
- Clarity in Order: Follows a logical structure (thesis-development or development-thesis).
- Precision: Uses extensive phrases, noun and verb complementation, jargon, definitions, and enumerations.
Humanistic Texts
Focus: Study of man from a social (law, economy) and individual (philosophy, art) perspective.
Types:
- Expository: Provides information on a topic.
- Argumentative: Presents arguments based on reasoning to persuade the reader.
Structure:
- Deductive (theory-development)
- Inductive (development-thesis)
- Framed (thesis-development-thesis)
- Parallel (Topic 1, Topic 2, Topic 3 [comparison])
Features:
- Morphological Level: Abundance of adjectives, abstract nouns, verbs, and conjunctions.
- Syntactic Level: Extensive nominal and verbal complementation, use of generalization mechanisms.
- Lexical Level: Use of cultisms and social science jargon.
- Semantic Level: Well-structured texts with an emphasis on style and rhetorical devices.
Legal and Administrative Texts
Purpose: Govern the operation of society and administration.
Types:
- Legal: Court-based texts, including laws, sentences, appeals, and demands.
- Legislative: Laws based on legislative bodies (parliament) and normative texts.
- Administrative: Communications within the administration.
Features:
- Written texts with a focus on accuracy.
- Prescriptive texts (forced compliance) with a conative function.
- Structured organization: applicant details, exhibition, request, signing, date, and location.
- Frequent use of descriptive adjectives and evaluative verbs in the third person.
- Abundance of nominal and verbal complementation.
- Use of technicalities, Latinisms, and formal phrases.
- Clear structuring of content with white spaces separating sections.
Literary Texts
Features:
- Invention by the author (fiction).
- Plurisignificative language with a poetic function.
- Emphasis on both form and content.
- Use of linguistic levels to enhance the artistic effect.
- Connotative language and rhetorical devices.
Literary Devices:
- Phonic Level: Alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhyme, assonance, consonance.
- Morphosyntactic Level: Hyperbaton, anaphora, parallelism, chiasmus.
- Semantic Level: Hyperbole, personification, epithets, metaphor, metonymy, symbol.