Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
text [Lat. textus ‘piece of plaited work; fabric’]
1 Theoretical term of formally limited, mainly written expressions that include more than one sentence.
2 Term from text linguistics and text theory. Linguistic form of expression of a communicative act which is individually determined (a) according to pragmatic, text-internal criteria of a communicative intention which is situation-specific and meets a corresponding listener expectation (text function), and (b) according to internal textual features, such as boundary signals, grammatical cohesion, dominant text theme, and content coherence (macrostructure, thematic development). In addition, there are properties of non-verbal signals, such as gesticulation, that constitute ‘text’ (Koch 1969; Kallmeyer et al. 1974). The internal and text-external characteristics of text form its textuality.
References
Bellert, I. 1970. On a condition of the coherence of texts. Semiotica 2.335–63.
Kallmeyer, W. et al. (eds) 1974. Lektürekolleg zur Textlinguistik, 2 vols. Frankfurt.
Koch, W. 1969.
Vom Morphem zum Textem. Hildesheim.
Van Dijk, T.A. 1972. Foundations for typologies of texts. Semiotica 6.297–323.
Vitacolonna, L. 1988. ‘Text’/‘Discourse’ definitions. In J.S.Petöfi (ed.), Text and discourse constitution. Berlin. 412–39.
3 According to Hjelmslev (
glossematics), the total of all linguistic expressions in the sense of a corpus.
References
Hjelmslev, L. 1943. Omkring sprogteoriens grundlaeggelse. Copenhagen. (Prolegomena to a theory of language, trans. F.J.Whitfield. Baltimore, MD, 1953.)
Journal
Text
pragmatics
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