Text linguistics

Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with texts as communication systems. Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars. The application of text linguistics has, however, evolved from this approach to a point in which text is viewed in much broader terms that go beyond a mere extension of traditional grammar towards an entire text. Text linguistics takes into account the form of a text, but also its setting, i. e. the way in which it is situated in an interactional, communicative context. Both the author of a (written or spoken) text as well as its addressee are taken into consideration in their respective (social and/or institutional) roles in the specific communicative context. In general it is an application of discourse analysis at the much broader level of text, rather than just a sentence or word.

Much attention has been given to the sentence as a self-contained unit, and not enough has been given to studying how sentences may be used in connected stretches of language. It is essentially the presentation of language as sets of sentences.

Text is extremely significant in communication because people communicate not by means of individual words or fragments of sentences in languages, but by means of texts. It is also the basis of various disciplines such as law, religion, medicine, science, politics, et cetera.

"A text is an extended structure of syntactic units [i. e. text as super-sentence] such as words, groups, and clauses and textual units that is marked by both coherence among the elements and completion ... [Whereas] a non-text consists of random sequences of linguistic units such as sentences, paragraphs, or sections in any temporal and/or spatial extension." (Werlich, 1976: 23)

"A naturally occurring manifestation of language, i. e. as a communicative language event in a context. The surface text is the set of expressions actually used; these expressions make some knowledge explicit, while other knowledge remains implicit, though still applied during processing." (Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981: 63)

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