Understanding Discourse and Textuality
Discourse and Text: Form, Meaning, and Context
Discourse is text in context. It involves an internal relationship between form and meaning and relates coherently to an external communicative function or purpose and a given audience.
Key Elements of Discourse
- Channel: Spoken, written, audiovisual, or visual.
- Agent: Monologic, dialogic, or multilogic.
- Register: Formal or informal.
- Social Context: The social setting.
- Purpose: Transactional, instructional, interactional (e.g., interview).
- Context: Embedded or reduced.
- Genre: Instructive, narrative, descriptive, persuasive (trying to convince with exaggerated adjectives, advertisement phrases), argumentative, informative, expository (informing, explaining, or describing with facts and data, e.g., essay).
- Number of Participants: Monologue, dialogue, multi-party (e.g., debate).
Text forms are the representation of text types.
Four Competences (M&S)
- Grammatical: Lexical resources, structural knowledge.
- Sociolinguistic: Using language in different social and cultural contexts, including verbal and non-verbal elements.
- Discourse: Sequencing structures to achieve a specific message (coherence).
- Strategic: Activating knowledge of other competences.
Similarities Between Text and Discourse
Both involve form and function.
Four Competences (B): Organizational = Grammatical + Pragmatical (illocutionary competence).
Standards of Textuality
Textuality defines what makes a text a cohesive unit, not just a collection of words.
1. Situationality
The ideal setting and audience for the discourse to be relevant.
- Settings: Physical, interactional (when, where, who).
- Language: Co-text (reflexive use of language, linguistically related).
- Behavioral Environment: Non-verbal communication.
- Extrasituational Context: Sociopolitical context.
2. Intentionality
The speaker’s intention, measurable through illocutionary acts (speech acts – the function or implication of what is said) and perlocutionary acts (the expected action from the audience). Example: “It’s raining outside” (implication: I want you to take cover).
Felicity Conditions: Patterns describing conditions for appropriate discourse. (H = hearer, S = speaker, A = action).
3. Intertextuality
The relationship between texts, including references and lexical items.
4. Informativity
How information in the text benefits the reader. Connecting new and old information; if both are present, the text is informative.
Fronting Device: Object-Subject-Verb (OSV), Subject-Verb-Object-Adverbial (ASVO), It-theme, and pseudo-cleft sentences (e.g., “It is *… What S # is O”).
Theme (main idea, topic, item at the beginning) & Rheme (comment):
- Constant Theme: Common theme shared by rhemes (cohesive ties replace the subject).
- Linear Theme: The rheme of one clause becomes the theme of the next.
- Split Rheme: (T – r1, r2), where r1 -> t + r, and r2 -> t + r.
- Derived Theme: Common in essays.
5. Acceptability
The text reaches the intended audience.
6. Lexical Cohesion
- a) Parallelism: Same syntactic structure with different words (e.g., “easy come, easy go” – adj + verb).
- b) Collocation: Words likely to appear together in the text.
- c) Partial Recurrence: Changing word class (e.g., meet/meeting, reunited/reunion, xd/xdear in two different clauses).
- d) Reiter: Using a general noun (e.g., cellphone, the thing), hyponym, superordinate, or synonym.
6b. Grammatical Cohesion
- a) Reference:
- Endophoric: Refers to something within the text.
- Anaphoric: Refers back to something previously mentioned.
- Personal: Personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, possessive determiners (e.g., “Josue, he”).
- Demonstrative.
- Comparative.
- b) Ellipsis: Omission of nominal, verbal, or clausal elements.
- Echoing: “Will anybody come?” “Yes, they will.” (The auxiliary is echoed, but the main verb is deleted).
- Auxiliary Contrasting: Similar to echoing, but the auxiliary is changed to contrast.
- Clausal Elements: “He said he loved me (when something), and he didn’t.”
- c) Substitution: Nominal (one/some), verbal (so/do), clausal (same).
- d) Conjunction: Relationships between segments: additive (and), adversative (but), causal, temporal.
7. Coherence
Reflected in the use of words and utterances, providing causal reasons, purpose, time, enablement (general to specific), conflict resolution, and sequence of events.