Tipi di testo in inglese: coesione, coerenza e discorso

Text types in English: cohesion, coherence and discourse

What standards texts must fulfill

Texts must meet certain standards to be considered effective. These standards guide how they might be produced or received and what people use them for in given settings.

Text linguistics

Text linguistics is a science that should describe or explain both the shared features and the distinctions among texts or text types. Words and sentences on the page are reliable clues, but they cannot be the total picture. The reigning question is how the texts function in human interaction.

What is a text?

A text will be defined as a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality. If any of these standards is not considered to have been satisfied, the text will not be communicative. Hence, non-communicative texts are treated as non-texts.

The seven standards of textuality

• Cohesion
• Coherence
• Intentionality
• Acceptability
• Informativity
• Situationality
• Intertextuality

1. Cohesion

Cohesion concerns the ways in which the components of the surface text, that is 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. Cohesion rests upon grammatical dependencies.

Surface sequences of English cannot be radically rearranged without causing disturbances. Lexical recurrence is not conceptual recurrence. Partial recurrence entails using the same basic word components but shifting them to a different word class. It is not necessary for each word to refer to exactly the same item or even be grammatically equivalent. An already activated concept can be re-used while its expression is adapted to various settings.

Reference:

• [situational] Exophora
• [textual] Endophora
  • [to preceding text] Anaphora
  • [to following text] Cataphora

2. Coherence

Coherence concerns the ways in which the components of the textual world, that is how the configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text, are mutually accessible and relevant. The discussion focused on coherence as the outcome of actualizing meanings in order to make "sense".

To investigate human activities with texts, meaning and sense should be treated in terms of procedures for utilizing knowledge in a wide range of tasks. A concept is definable as a configuration of knowledge (cognitive content) which can be recovered or activated with more or less unity and consistency in the mind. Relations are the links between concepts which appear together in a textual world. Each link would bear a designation of the concept it connects to. Whereas the meanings of expressions or the content of concepts are highly disputable in isolation, their occurrence within a textual world where processing must be performed should be reasonably stabilizing and delimiting.

Field includes:

1. The topic
2. The interactants

Field: what language is being used to talk about

The topic of discourse can be:

1. Specialized/technical (for example talking about the environment)
2. Everyday (for example talking about shopping)

The interactants may have:

• Specialized knowledge of the field (for example a scientist writing for an article for an academic journal)
• Common knowledge of the field (for example the readers of a newspaper article)

Multidimensional analysis

1. No single dimension is adequate in itself to account for the range of linguistic variation in a language (multidimensional analysis is required).

2. Dimensions are continuous of variation rather than dichotomous distinctions.

3. The cooccurrence patterns underlying dimensions are identified quantitatively (no a priori functional basis). Dimensions are characterized by linguistic and functional content.