Understanding Textual Properties: Fitness, Coherence, and More
Understanding Textual Properties
Fitness: Fitness is a textual property where the message appropriately fits the situation, the text being issued, and the purpose of the issuer. For appropriate text, the author must consider the characteristics of the recipient, the subject matter, and the situation in which the text will be received.
Coherence
Coherence is the property that guarantees the unity of meaning in a text. It presents ideas around a single theme and structures them logically.
Global Consistency
Global consistency guarantees the unified direction of the text.
- Consistency between the parts is achieved when every paragraph and every sentence contributes to the overall sense of the text.
Cohesion
Cohesion: Cohesion is the property that establishes the connection between the parts of a text. The three types of resources to foster cohesion match the features of a text:
- Lexical features: Word relationships
- Morphological and syntactic features: People, tenses, grammatical structures
- Textual features: Discursive markers, deictic elements
Classification of Texts
According to the predominant function, texts can be referential, expressive, poetic, and metalinguistic.
- Linguistically, by level, texts can be popular, standard, or cultivated.
- Within the field of use, there are academic, social, occupational, family, literary, and media texts.
Textual Modalities
Textual modalities depend on the communicative purpose and structure of the text. Types include:
- Narrative: Relates events that occurred to characters at a particular time and space.
- Descriptive: Represents people, animals, objects, or processes, referring to their attributes or parts.
- Dialogue: Reproduces a conversation between several individuals.
- Expository: Reports on a subject, developing data and concepts.
- Argumentative: Reasonably defends a review.
Oral and Written Texts: Differences
- Spoken language has a transient character, while written language has a lasting character.
- Spoken language involves immediate exchange, while writing allows for deferred communication.
- The essence of spoken language is interactivity, permitting exchange of roles between sender and receiver; writing is unidirectional.
- Spoken language is often spontaneous, while written language requires elaboration.
- The spontaneity of spoken language involves a more colloquial style.
Statement
A statement is the smallest unit of speech communication that can convey a full and complete message within the communicative situation in which it is produced. Three common features are:
- They are full messages.
- They are sequences of sounds framed between two silences.
- They can be sentences, or lack a verbal syntactic structure.
The Conference
A conference is a dissertation or exposition of reasons, other than a written text, delivered to an audience. It is a formal text with a developed and unidirectional character.
- Structure: Greeting, introduction, development, conclusion, farewell.
- Textual features: Expository text with an appeal function.
The Interview
An interview is a formal dialogue in which an interviewer asks a series of questions to a person to gather information and obtain their views.
- Structure: Presentation and word shifts.
- Textual features: Dominates the appellate function, also uses deictic elements.
Discussion and Gatherings
Discussions and gatherings consist of an exchange in which multiple partners express their opinions, guided by a moderator.
- Structure: Presentation, exhibition, development, recapitulation.
- Textual features: Argumentative, oral exchanges, formal.