What is a TEXT‪?‬

Text Linguistics

With all the books and writings so manyfolded and spread across the world, has anybody ever wondered what a text is? Early on children start reading and writing. At school they call it text reading or text comprehension, which everybody accepts but nobody ever questions. I did not either, until April 2001. Within the course Linguis-tics and Poetics I chose to talk about the definition of text and suddenly I wondered what that was - four letters forming the one word, TEXT.

In this paper I want to go where several scholars have gone before. I want to discuss questions like: What part of linguistics devotes time and effort to text defini-tions? Where lie its origins? What is a text, and last but not least, what do people do with a text? Books to answer these questions are available at large by now and a chosen number of twelve shall help me to uncover the answers to those aforemen-tioned questions as I go along.

This paper is to be written within the framework of linguistics, a field analyzing specific language structures such as phonemes, morphemes and words. Apart from those, though, it also covers syntactic (e.g. noun- or verb phrases) and semantic structures (e.g. sememes). When working on textual structures, scholars enter the field of text linguistics. For Teun van Dijk this means: "any work in language science devoted to the text as the primary object of inquiry." (De Beaugrande 1981: 14)

The origins of text linguistics lie in Ancient Greece and Rome. Back then it was called rhetorics. Its focus was, for instance, on how ideas could be arranged and with which appropriate expressions. In the 1960s, a text was regarded as one unit larger than a sentence, and in the ′70s different types of text structures were discovered and classified. Those were the days when only few researchers were familiar with text studies, whereas nowadays a large number of works is available. Today a text is more likely to be seen as something that consists of well-formed sentences in sequence.
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