2 The standards of textuality cohesion Traditional approach

2. The standards of textuality: cohesion

• Traditional approach to the study of lannguage: sentence as conventional object of study • Structuralism (Bloofield, Harris, Chomsky): sentence as the largest unit with an inherent structure (cf. Bloomfield 1933: 170). Whatever fell beyond the scope of the sentence was assigned to the domain of stylistics. Meaning as a secondary aspect, because it includes extra-linguistic aspects

• Uo to the 70 s no established methodology that would apply to texts • ‘“text linguistics” cannot be a designation for a single theory or method. Instead, it designates any work in language science devoted to the text as the primary object of inquiry’ De Beaugrande - Dressler

historical roots • Rhetoric: • training public orators • texts evaluated in terms of their effects upon the audience of receivers; • texts are vehicles of purposeful interaction. • Stylistics • style results from the characteristic selection of options for producing a text. • literary studies • Anthropology • language as human activity; focus on meaning • Sociology • analysis of conversation as a mode of social organization and interaction

Where TL comes from • Rhetoric shares several concerns with text linguistics, notably the assumptions that: • (a) arranging of ideas is open to systematic control; • (b) the transition between ideas and expressions can be subjected to conscious training; • (c) among the various texts which express a given configuration of ideas, some are of higher quality than others; • (d) judgements of texts can be made in terms of their effects upon the audience of receivers; • (e) texts are vehicles of purposeful interaction.

Both Rhetoric and TL concerned with: • “How are discoverable structures built through operations of decision and selection, and what are the implications of those operations for communicative interaction? ” as opposed to • “What structures can analysis uncover in a language? ”, (traditional linguistic)

many aspects of texts only appear systematic in view of how texts are produced, presented, and received.

«When we move beyond the sentence boundary, we enter a domain characterized by greater freedom of selection or variation and lesser conformity with established rules. For instance, we can state that an English declarative sentence must contain at least a noun phrase and an agreeing verb phrase, as in that perennial favourite of linguists: [18] The man hit the ball. But if we ask how [18] might fit into a text, e. g. : [18 a] The man hit the ball. The crowd cheered him on. [18 b] The man hit the ball. He was cheered on by the crowd. [18 c] The man hit the ball. The crowd cheered the promising rookie on. it is much harder to decide what expression for the ‘man’ should be used in a follow-up sentence (e. g. ‘him’ vs. ‘this promising rookie’), and in what format (e. g. active vs. passive).

TEXT • An extended structure of syntactic units (W) • A communicative occurrence (d. B-D) • The larger units in terms of which utterances (i. e. sequences of sentences) should be constructed. (v. D 3) • H-H: "The word text is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole. […] A text is a unit of language in use. ” • "The concept of texture is entirely appropriate to express the property of 'being a text'. A text has texture and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text".

Standards of textuality • For Werlich: coherence and completion (W 23 -25) • For De Beaugrande –Dressler: seven standards, which serve as constitutive principles of textual communication. most important ones: cohesion and coherence. It is to be noted that the two elements of this conceptual distinction taken together correspond broadly to Werlich's coherence. • v. D (93) defines only coherence: "a semantic property of discourses, based on the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences".

• “A text will be defined as a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality. . . (d. B-D)

standards of textuality: • cohesion • coherence • intentionality • acceptability • informativity • situationality • intertextuality.

From text linguistics to discourse analysis • Text-internal criteria • Cohesion • Coherence “pure” text linguistics Discourse analysis • Text-external criteria • • • Intentionality Acceptability Informativity Situationality Intertextuality

1. Cohesion • • how the components of the surface text, i. e. the actual words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence. The surface components depend upon each other according to grammatical forms and conventions, such that cohesion rests upon grammatical dependencies. .

2. Coherence concerns the ways in which the components of the textual world, i. e. the configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text are mutually accessible and relevant. .

Cohesion and coherence • cohesion = connectivity of the surface • coherence = connectivity of underlying content