Understanding Text: Properties, Types, and Linguistic Forms
Text: Any linguistic communication, oral or written, made by a speaker in particular circumstances. It is a communicative act, because the speaker performs an action by expressing an intention. It occurs in a particular extra-linguistic situation. The text has a structure that relates its entirety by giving coherence and unity. The extension has no precise boundaries. All text must satisfy requirements: textual properties, which are adequacy, coherence, and cohesion. These properties must be added to the correction, and we must also take account of stylistic variation.
Textual Properties
Adequacy: Serving the text-to-state relationship. A text is adequate if it achieves the communicative purpose that the issuer has marked.
Mutual Consistency: Property of the text that gives meaning unit, so that all elements related to form a global significance.
Cohesion: Ensures the relation of the various elements of the text, and the relationship between text and extra-linguistic situation.
Cohesion Mechanisms
- The reference is given to grammatical and lexical level.
- Deixis relates the text to extra-linguistic context.
- Anaphora links one element to another that has appeared previously.
- Cataphora is the relationship that exists between a known element that appears very close to the text and, thanks to the context, it is easily retrievable.
- Connection: It makes explicit the discourse markers or connectors.
The Essay
A text written in prose, usually brief, with a target of explanation or interpretation, in which the writer gives a personal and subjective view on any issue in a careful way. The essay is a literary genre.
Types of Text and Structure
The text types that dominate are exposition and argumentation. Regarding the structure, the essay is a very open kind.
In developing the theme, it tends to follow an order or deductive analysis. The most characteristic aspect of the trial is free of structure. In the essay, using quotes from authority or made explicit references to other texts.
Linguistic Forms
- Subjective expression manifests itself mainly in the utilization of the first person singular or plural when the author wants to involve the recipient. Besides declarative sentences, interrogative sentences appear and are also called.
- A personal and entertaining style is achieved by the utilization of rhetorical devices.
- In vocabulary, some technicalities may appear. Also, there are many abstract nouns. The subjectivity also requires the presence of evaluative adjectives.
Scientific and Technical Texts
The scientists explain the reality to which the recipient acquires knowledge about it, while technical texts apply knowledge of science to act on reality.
The function of scientific and technical texts is to convey factual knowledge of reality. The goal is to make universal statements, objective, and true. These features require a language capable of expressing the concepts with precision and clarity. His vocabulary has to be denotative and unequivocal.
- In the scientific and technical texts dominated the exhibition and the argument.
Linguistic Forms
Characterized by an abundance of jargon, making up the terminology, the presence of artificial languages, and formal registration.
- In the morphological and syntactic level:
Objectivity
Is manifested in the characteristic use of forms which express disinterest by the agent. Other resources that present objectivity are the predominance of declarative intonation and use of the indicative mood and present.
Clarity
Is achieved through well-constructed sentences. Short simple sentences are combined with compound sentences. Are characteristic of SN and also expanded the CC.
Cohesion
Plays a relevant role with textual markers that distribute and order content and establish relationships between ideas. The repetition of a word or phrase is often used when searching the text comprehension.