Textual Properties: Narrative, Expository, and Argumentative Texts
Descriptive Text
Painting made with words. It distinguishes the technical description from the objective or subjective description of a landscape, an object, a person, an animal, time, feelings, etc., with an aesthetic function.
Procedures and Features
- Verb forms: The most commonly used are the present and the imperfect past.
- Names predominate over verbs.
- Many nouns (widely adjectival) and adjectives stimulate the senses, complementing substantive information with expressive nuance. Epithets.
- Attributive structures abound to express syntactic qualities.
- Syntactic structures: Juxtaposed and coordinated structures predominate.
- Literary procedures: Images, metaphors, comparisons, synesthesia, pomposity, alliteration, metonymy… to embellish or degrade the object.
Narrative Text
Its purpose is to tell a story. It is characterized by verisimilitude, and from a narrative point of view, it aims to maintain the reader’s interest and curiosity. The key elements in a narrative (epic, story, novel, etc.) are:
- Action: What happens.
- Characters: Those who perform the action.
- Setting: The environment in which the action takes place.
The action is usually ordered:
- Exposition: A showcase of the action, characters, and setting.
- Rising Action/Knot: The course of events.
- Falling Action/Outcome: The resolution of the situation.
Expository Text
To expose is to provide information or an explanation on any subject clearly and orderly so that others may know or learn. Examples include popular works, textbooks, specialized scientific texts, and newspaper articles. It is important to establish order in the ideas presented to the reader:
- Introduction
- Body
- Conclusion
Related to order, we must distinguish:
- Deductive order: Explaining from the general and arriving at the particular.
- Inductive order: Starting from individual cases to reach a general conclusion.
The expository technique uses enumeration, description, clarity, and objectivity, without value judgments, in the present indicative.
Argumentative Text
To argue is to provide reasons to defend an opinion, to convince a recipient to think in a certain way.
Structure of an Argument
- Introduction
- Body/Argumentative Thesis
- Conclusion
Types of Arguments
- Argument from Authority
- Proverbs and Sayings
- The General Feeling of Society
- Frequency
Procedures Used
- Coherence in the order and arrangement of arguments
- Examples
- Repetition
Adequacy
Property directly related to the communicative nature of the text. For a text to be adequate, the issuer, based on their communicative intent, must take into account: the recipient, the relationship between the two, the channel used to communicate the message, and the set of extralinguistic circumstances. The issuer selects, among the possibilities that the language provides, the diaphasic variety or register. In addition, all text is part of a genre, and the recipient expects it to fit.
Consistency
A semantic phenomenon (affecting its content), a fundamental property of the text (based on other textual properties). Consistency has to be expressed by linguistic means of diverse nature (lexical and syntactic). It helps to provide the text with global significance.
Methods
- Selection of relevant and irrelevant information, in a particular organizational structure that properly develops the subject or topic of the text.
- This global unity of meaning depends on both the linguistic properties of the text and the interpretation process by the receiver.
An important aspect of achieving consistency is the theme/rheme information structure:
- Theme: Information considered already known.
- Rheme: New information.
Related to the information structure of the elements of the statement is the issue of thematic progression. The text has to develop a theme or topic, so that, gradually, new information is added to information already known by the context. We can distinguish between:
- Linear progression: Each rheme of a sentence is the origin of the theme of the following sentence.
- Constant theme progression: The same theme appears in successive sentences, supplemented by different rhemes.
- Progression of derived themes: It is a succession of themes, with corresponding rhemes, which are different manifestations of the same hypertheme.
Cohesion
The set of linguistic processes that make clear the profound relationship between the various elements that constitute a text. The main textual bonding methods (syntactic-semantic) are the following:
- Recurrence: Repetition of an element of a text or parts of it. It can take different forms: Lexical reiteration, semantic recurrence (synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, etc.)
- Substitution: Replacing a unit of text with: Lexical proforms (words of wide meaning), pronouns that substitute a unit of text, ellipsis, or discursive markers.