The term text and discourse are used in a variety of ways by different linguistics and researchers. Text
like any term in scientific literature (and by scientific I mean academic scholarly) unfortunately this term
can be used by different authors with different meanings. And even philosophers sometimes use words or
terms loosely. In this course, we will talk about text as the verbal component, the linguistic material, that is
produced by a writer or a speaker and this is processed by a recipient (a reader or a hero). If we think about
the etymology of this word text comes from latin “textus” which both means texture and text.
A verbal text is made up of a number of inter-connected parts.
What factors contribute to make a text a text (and not a string of sentences)?
Cohesive relations
The definition of “cohesion” by Charteris-Black is: ”different parts of a text can be related to each other by
various lexical and grammatical relationships, which contribute to the impression of the wholeness”.
If I say “I’ve just had a problem with the webcam” and “the window is open” this is no a text, there is no
cohesion between the two sentence. If I say, “I’ve just had a problem with the webcam” and “the window
in my classroom is open” this is may be a text. Why? Because I’m using the first person subject and then
I’m using the first possessive adjective. So we have a grammatical tie that links the two sentences.
Grammatical cohesion:
-Reference: How words are connected and related with other words that also occur in the text and
entities external to the text. Reference indicates the presence of elements that instead of being
semantically interpretable in autonomously way refer to something else for their interpretation.
When we talk language is economic. So, for instance, instead of repeating the same words over and
over we tend to use pronouns.
The first phenomenon that we see when we have reference is the phenomenon of “deixis” is a
term that comes from the Greek language and means “to point to indicate”. Deixis has to do with
three main phenomenon:
People: I/We/You (ambiguity)
Time: Now/Then
Place: Here/There
We have endophoric and exophoric reference: words that refer to other words which occur within
the text establish endophoric references, those who refer to entities that are external to the text
establish exophoric references. Exophoric reference are words that can only be explained with
reference to the external social and political circumstances of the text.
Endophoric reference: anaphoric reference and cataphoric reference. Anaphoric reference arises
when a hearer understands a words by referring back to something preciously said. The majority of
endophoric references are also anaphoric.
Cataphoric reference arises “when a word refers forward to something that will follow in the text”.
Much less common than anaphoric reference.
-Substitution: is when you replace one element by another
-Ellipsis: is a substitution by zero instead of putting something else you don’t put anything.
-Conjunction: words that connect various sentences
Lexical Cohesion:
-Repetition : when a word is repeated in another sentence. We have simple repetition (when you
use the same, precise, identical word) and complex repetition (when you repeat a word that shares
the same roots)
-Collocation : is a phenomenon that is very interesting because it’s not
De Beaugrande and Dressler’s definition of text text is a communicative event that must satisfy the
following seven criteria:
1) Cohesion text internal criteria
2) Coherence
