textuality
Features of Online Discourse
Halliday & Hasan (1989) provide a useful approach derived from the field of discourse analysis that can contribute to understand the context of situation in which a text shall function. Their simple conceptual framework of three headings serves “to interpret the social context of a text, the environment in which meanings are being exchanged” ( Halliday & Hasan 1989, p 12). I consider knowing this environment as essential for the creation of Web texts in general.
What Actually Is a Text?
Traditionally, a text used to be understood as a piece of written language, say a poem, a novel or a single chapter in a book (see Fairclough 1995). To modern linguists a text is “[…] any instance of living language that is playing some part in a context of situation […]. It may be either spoken or written, or indeed in any other medium of expression that we like to think of” (Halliday & Hasan 1989, p 10). Essentially, a text is a semantic unit that cannot simply be “defined as being just another kind of sentence, only bigger” (Halliday & Hasan 1989, p 10). It is rather the inherent meaning that defines a unit of language a text, although this meaning is still coded in words or structures, which in turn have to be recoded in sounds or letters, as Halliday & Hasan (1989) further explain.
2007-06-24 20:21 | 06. Characteristics of Web Texts
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Categories
- 01. Meta (4)
- 02. Internet Usage (4)
- 03. Literature (3)
- 04. Terminology (5)
- 05. E-Commerce (2)
- 06. Characteristics of Web Texts (10)
- 07. Human Factors (3)
- 08. Writing for the Web (7)