What Actually Is a Text?

2007-06-24 21:21 |

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.

Modern Text Linguistics vs. Conventional Linguistics

De Beaugrande & Dressler (1981, p 3) have on their part defined text as “a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality”. The authors also state that “if any of these standards is not considered to have been satisfied, the text will not be communicative. Hence, non-communicative texts are treated as non-texts.” (De Beaugrande & Dressler (1981, p 3) This is what I consider the actual legitimacy to deal with Web texts from a linguistic point of view, as a text must be perceivable as such to effectively communicate its message. An author will have to make sure that the textual organisation of his message on surface meets the standards formulated by text linguists – especially when writing on the Web, as we shall see later.

De Beaugrande & Dressler’s definition (1981) also describes two basic aspects of textual communication. The first is text being an instance of a discourse; the second refers to the way its communicative value is kept up across the sentences. These two dimensions of analysis have become very important objects in text linguistics, besides the actual content of the text. I will explain the ‘seven standards of textuality’ in detail with a later posting, as it is one of my goals as a linguist to use such approaches in order to make any text for my customers’ Web sites as communicative as possible.

But before I would like to highlight the fact that modern text linguistics has a broader conception of the piece of language that shall be studied or produced than conventional linguistics has of sentences. This means that a Web author, too, must have a broader conception of the communication that he aims at than only being interested in good sentences. I have paved the way for this realisation in my previous posting on the context of e-commerce. In the following postings, I will provide an understanding of the medium that carries the information, which is – for the concern of this weblog – the Web page on the computer screen. These two aspects are closely related, as my argumentation will show, and therefore both aspects are presented in this single category, even if I may overlap linguistic and technical aspects.

Contexts Precede Texts

Anyway, modern text linguistics provides the (analytic) tools to make sure a text is communicative even beyond the scope of the text’s body. Without any question, one must know from the beginning what information shall be given, and one must be aware of the own intentions to do so. This is why I have sketched the context of my concerns in the previous postings. The notion of a text in linguistics has consequently been defined in this article. Proceeding that way has been derived from Halliday & Hasan (1989, p 5) saying that “in real life, contexts precede texts”.

Published by Christian Kuhn

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