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2. The standards of textuality:
cohesion
• Traditional approach to the study of lannguage: sentence as conventional object
of study
• Structuralism (Bloofield, Harris, Chomsky): sentence as the largest unit with an
inherent structure (cf. Bloomfield 1933: 170). Whatever fell beyond the scope of
the sentence was assigned to the domain of stylistics.
Meaning as a secondary aspect, because it includes extra-linguistic aspects
• Uo to the 70s no established methodology that would apply to texts
• ‘“text linguistics” cannot be a designation for a single theory or
method. Instead, it designates any work in language science devoted
to the text as the primary object of inquiry’
De Beaugrande - Dressler
historical roots
• Rhetoric:
• training public orators
• texts evaluated in terms of their effects upon the audience of receivers;
• texts are vehicles of purposeful interaction.
• Stylistics
• style results from the characteristic selection of options for producing a text.
• literary studies
• Anthropology
• language as human activity; focus on meaning
• Sociology
• analysis of conversation as a mode of social organization and interaction
Where TL comes from
• Rhetoric shares several concerns with text linguistics, notably the
assumptions that:
• (a) arranging of ideas is open to systematic control;
• (b) the transition between ideas and expressions can be subjected to
conscious training;
• (c) among the various texts which express a given configuration of ideas,
some are of higher quality than others;
• (d) judgements of texts can be made in terms of their effects upon the
audience of receivers;
• (e) texts are vehicles of purposeful interaction.
Both Rhetoric and TL concerned with:
• “How are discoverable structures built through operations of decision
and selection, and what are the implications of those operations for
communicative interaction?”
as opposed to
• “What structures can analysis uncover in a language?”, (traditional
linguistic)
many aspects of texts only appear systematic in view of how texts are
produced, presented, and received.
«When we move beyond the sentence boundary, we enter a domain
characterized by greater freedom of selection or variation and lesser
conformity with established rules.
For instance, we can state that an English declarative sentence must contain
at least a noun phrase and an agreeing verb phrase, as in that perennial
favourite of linguists:
[18] The man hit the ball.
But if we ask how [18] might fit into a text, e.g.:
[18a] The man hit the ball. The crowd cheered him on.
[18b] The man hit the ball. He was cheered on by the crowd.
[18c] The man hit the ball. The crowd cheered the promising rookie on.
it is much harder to decide what expression for the ‘man’ should be used in a
follow-up sentence (e.g. ‘him’ vs. ‘this promising rookie’), and in what format
(e.g. active vs. passive).
TEXT
• An extended structure of syntactic units (W)
• A communicative occurrence (dB-D)
• The larger units in terms of which utterances (i.e. sequences of
sentences) should be constructed. (vD 3)
• H-H: "The word text is used in linguistics to refer to any
passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form
a unified whole. […] A text is a unit of language in use.”
• "The concept of texture is entirely appropriate to express the
property of 'being a text'. A text has texture and this is what
distinguishes it from something that is not a text".
Standards of textuality
• For Werlich: coherence and completion (W 23-25)
• For De Beaugrande –Dressler: seven standards, which serve as constitutive
principles of textual communication. most important ones: cohesion and
coherence.
It is to be noted that the two elements of this conceptual distinction taken
together correspond broadly to Werlich's coherence.
• vD (93) defines only coherence: "a semantic property of discourses, based on the
interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other
sentences".
• “A text will be defined as a communicative occurrence which meets
seven standards of textuality. .... (dB-D)
standards of textuality:
• cohesion
• coherence
• intentionality
• acceptability
• informativity
• situationality
• intertextuality.
From text linguistics to discourse analysis
• Text-internal criteria
• Cohesion
• Coherence
“pure” text linguistics
Discourse analysis
• Text-external criteria
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Intentionality
Acceptability
Informativity
Situationality
Intertextuality
1. Cohesion
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how the components of the surface text, i.e. the actual words we
hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence.
The surface components depend upon each other according to
grammatical forms and conventions, such that cohesion rests upon
grammatical dependencies. ...
Cohesive elements in
de Beaugrande-Dressler’s model (integrated with
Halliday-Hasan’s model
 use of pro-forms
 (personal / demonstrative pronouns)
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grammar dependency
network, at phrase, clause and sentence level
comparative reference
text conjunctives (inter-sentence);
paratactic conjunctives;
hypotactic conjunctives
 ellipsis
 substitution
 Lexical and textual cohesion
 recurrence
 partial recurrence
 parallelism
 paraphrase
 collocation
 hyponymy / meronimy
 synonymy / antonimy
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 functional sentence perspective information
structure and focus - thematic structure
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Intonation
2. Coherence
concerns the ways in which the components of the textual world,
i.e. the configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the
surface text are mutually accessible and relevant. ...
Cohesion and coherence
• cohesion = connectivity of the surface
• coherence = connectivity of underlying content