What is (a) Text?
Ahmad Nadhif
(a) Text
• It refers to any passage, spoken or written,
of whatever length, that does form a
unified whole.
• In systemic terms, a text is a unit of
meanings, a unit which expresses
simultaneously, ideational, interpersonal,
and textual meanings.
Is this a text?
Texture
• It is the property that distinguishes text
from non-text. It is what holds the clauses
of a text together to give them unity.
• Texture involves the interaction of two
components: coherence and cohesion.
Coherence
• It is text’s relationship to its extra-textual
context (the social and cultural context of
its occurrence).
Cohesion
• It is the way the elements within a text
bind it together as “a unified whole”.
Two Types of Coherence
• Registerial coherence: the situation in which
all the clauses of the text could occur: 1) the
domain the text is focusing on (its field), 2) the
roles the interactants are playing (its tenor),
and 3) the way language is tied to the
experience its commenting on (its mode).
• Generic coherence: a unified purpose
motivating the language, usually expressed
through a predictable generic or schematic
structure.
Three types of Cohesion
• Reference: How the writer/speaker introduces
participants and then keeps track of them
once they are in the text.
• Lexical Cohesion: How the writer/speaker
uses lexical items and event sequences to
relate the text consistently to its area of focus
or its field.
• Conjunctive cohesion: how the writer
creates and expresses logical relationships
between parts of a text.
Reference
• Homophoric reference: taken from the
general context of culture. (e.g. How hot
the sun is today)
• Exophoric reference: taken from the
immediate context of situation. (E.g if A
and B are at the same place and the same
time and A says to B, “Put it down next to
her”.)
• Endophoric reference: taken from
elswhere within the text itself. (e.g. She
didn’t hear the story)
Three types of Endophoric
Reference
• Anaphoric reference
• Cataphoric reference
• Esphoric reference.
Anaphoric reference
• It is when the referent has appeared at an
earlier point in the text.
She didn’t hear the story.
Cataphoric reference
• It is When the referent has not yet
appeared but will be provided
subsequently.
Esphoric reference
• It is when the referent occurs in the phrase
immediately following the presuming
referent item (within the same nominal
group/noun phrase, not in a separate
clause).
She could see in the open square before her
house the tops of trees.
Two main types of Lexical
Cohesion
• Taxonomical lexical relations: where
one lexical item relates to another through
either class/subclass (e.g rodent-mouse)
or part/whole (e.g tail-mouse) relation.
• Expectancy relations: where there is a
predictable relation between a process
(verb) and either the doer of that process
or the one affected by it (e.g.
mouse-squeak, nibble-cheese).
Two types of Taxonomic Lex.
Relation
• Classification: it is the relationship
between a superordinate term and its
member or hyponym (x is a type of y
relationship).
• Composition: it is the part-whole
relationship between lexical items which
are meronyms (whole to part or vice versa,
e.g. body:heart) or co-meronyms (being
parts of common whole, e.g heart:lungs).
Main kinds of classification
• Co-hyponomy (e.g. influenza:pneumonia)
=> subordinate of illness.
• Class/sub-class (e.g. illness:pneumonia)
• Contrast (e.g. clear:blurry)
• Similarity: synonymy (e.g message:report)
and repetition (death:death)
Three types of Conjunctive
Cohesion
• Elaboration: a relationship of restatement
or clarification (for example, to illustrate, in
fact, etc.)
• Extension: a relationship of either addition
or variation (in addition, on the other hand,
instead, etc.)
• Enhancement: a relationship of meaning
development. (meanwhile, next,
afterwards, before that, at the same time,
etc.)
