Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Linguistic discipline which analyses the linguistic regularities and constitutive features of texts. Text linguistics has developed since the 1960s from its structuralist foundations (tagmemics, text analysis, the Prague School) and has been integrated into the research foundations of stylistics and rhetoric. The historical significance of text linguistics lies in the fact that it overcame the narrow sentence-specific perspective of linguistics and thereby created a basis for the interdisciplinary study of texts. The development of the discipline is reflected in the various definitions of text. If one defines ‘text’ as a sequence of sentences and thereby a unit of the linguistic system, text linguistics is an expanded sentence grammar and therefore constitutes discourse grammar. The methods of sentence analysis are transferred to transphrastic analysis and lead to the composition of text grammatical rules of cohesion. If one understands ‘text’ as a communicative unit, further features like text function or text theme result from text-grammatical regularities. In this broader framework, which includes text grammar, text linguistics includes the following problems: (a) general aspects of structural and functional text constituents, i.e. textuality; (b) classification of texts in the framework of a text typology; (c) problems concerning the integration of stylistics and rhetoric; (d) interdisciplinary-oriented research in the direction of text reworking and comprehensibility.
References
Beaugrande, R.A. de. 1980. Text, discourse and process: toward a multidisciplinary science of texts. London.
——1992.
A new introduction to the study of text and discourse. London.
Beaugrande, R. de and W.-U.Dressler. 1981. Introduction to text linguistics. London.
Conte, M.E. et al. (eds) 1989. Text and discourse connectedness: proceedings of the conference on connexity and coherence Urbino, July 16–21, 1984. Amsterdam.
Dressler, W.U. (ed.) 1978. Current trends in text linguistics. Berlin.
Petöfi, J.S. 1979–82. Text vs sentence. Hamburg.
Van Dijk, T.A. 1990. The future of the field: discourse analysis in 1990. Text 10.133–56.
coherence
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