Text Types, Properties, and Linguistic Features
Text: Definition and Properties
A text is the result of the verbal activity of an issuer in a particular communicative context and with a specific communicative intention. From the linguistic elements of the text and the context, we recognize the communicative intention of the author, which allows us to interpret the meaning of the text.
Types of Generators and Text Genres
We call text types the forms of expression, structure, and linguistic features that appear with the issuer’s communicative intention. Texts include: narrative, descriptive, expository, argumentative, and dialogic. Homogeneous texts are those that are published in only one type. Heterogeneous texts are combined.
The communicative intent (to inform, express feelings, entertain, etc.), the textual bases (narrative, description, exposition, argumentation, dialogue), the subject, and the social agreement cause texts to be organized into genres.
Expository Texts
In expository texts, the author conveys information to improve the recipient’s knowledge of any topic. The internal structure is divided into introduction, development, and conclusion.
- Deductive Order: The order of content arises starting from the general to the particular.
- Inductive Order: From the particular to the general.
- Framed: The main idea is in the conclusion.
Linguistic Features of Expository Texts
- Usually declarative sentences
- Specialized vocabulary
- Specific adjectives
- Present tense with timeless value
- Impersonal structures
- Quotations from other authors
- The presence of connectors
- Typographical procedures
- Predominance of denotation (informational values of the word)
Text: Definition and Properties
The text is the linguistic analysis unit whose meaning is interpreted taking into account contextual factors: the communicative intention of the sender, time, and place.
Cohesion
Cohesion is what sorts statements, relates content, and gives unity to the text by:
- Recurrences: Repetitions, synonyms, hyponyms, or hypernyms.
- Ellipsis
- Topicalization
- Discursive Markers: Words that link expressions (structuring, reformulated, argumentative operators, conventional markers, connectors that bind to a logic the elements that compose a text (additive, counter-argumentative, consecutive, conclusive, and temporary).
- Deictics: Linguistic elements that indicate a person, places, times, things, or context. They organize time and space or place characters. They are based on substitution (of person: personal pronouns, possessive verbal morphemes; of place: adverbs, determiners, adjectives, demonstrative pronouns; of time: adverbs and adverbial phrases; social: treatment formulas and pronouns; discursive: anaphora, cataphora).
- Context: Set of time-space circumstances of shared beliefs (linguistic factors: anaphora and cataphora; extralinguistic factors: time-space situation, the sociocultural context).
Adequacy
Adequacy ensures that the register chosen by the issuer is appropriate for a specific situation. The register should depend on the emissivity-receiver relationship, the intention, and the recipient.
Consistency
Consistency ensures that the text makes logical sense and is used to communicate something correctly. It establishes the unity of all that is said, thematic progression, and the logical arrangement of content. Consistency is lost when the above is not met (inappropriate lexical connectors are used), sentences are poorly constructed, and anacoluthons are committed.
The information of a text is given by its literal meaning (denotative), its connotations (as the context and intent with which they are said), the assumption (implicit information in a message), and the implicature (which we can deduce from the message, which it does not say).