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2. The standards of textuality:
cohesion
From the sentence to the text
• Traditional approach to the study of language: sentence
as conventional object of study
• Structuralism (Bloofield, Harris, Chomsky): sentence as
the largest unit with an inherent structure (cf. Bloomfield
1933: 170).
• Language samples were gathered and analysed
according to systems of minimal units (phonemes,
morphemes, syntagmemes…). Each system of minimal
units constitutes a level organized by the opposition of
units and their distinctive features, so that each unit was
in some way distinct from all others.
• 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
• Up to the 70s 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:
The man hit the ball.
But if we ask how that might fit into a text, e.g.:
[a] The man hit the ball. The crowd cheered him on.
[b] The man hit the ball. He was cheered on by the crowd.
[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 (Werlich 1983)
• A communicative occurrence (deBeaugrande-Dressler
1981)
• Any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that
does form a unified whole. […] A text is a unit of
language in use (Halliday-Hasan 1976)
• 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
(deBeaugrande-Dressler 1981).
Standards of textuality
• For De Beaugrande –Dressler: seven standards, which
serve as constitutive principles of textual communication.
Most important ones: cohesion and coherence.
• “A text will be defined as a communicative occurrence
which meets seven standards of textuality. .... (dB-D)
standards of textuality:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
cohesion
coherence
intentionality
acceptability
informativity
situationality
intertextuality.
• Text-internal criteria
– Cohesion
– Coherence
“pure” text linguistics
Discourse analysis
• Text-external criteria
–
–
–
–
–
Intentionality
Acceptability
Informativity
Situationality
Intertextuality
text linguistics and discourse
analysis
• The difference basically lies in the emphasis the
two disciplines place on the two sets of criteria of
textuality: in the “purely” textlinguistic
approaches texts are viewed as “more or less
explicit phenomena of cognitive processes”
(Tischer et al., 2000: 29), and the context plays
a subordinate role, whereas discourse analysis
considers both text internal and text external
criteria
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. ...
Cohesive elements in
de Beaugrande-Dressler’s model
(integrated with Halliday-Hasan’s model)

use of pro-forms/reference
•
•
personal / demonstrative pronouns
premodifiers (such)

grammar dependency network,
at phrase, clause and sentence
level
•
•
•
•
•
•
morphology
tense/aspect
comparative reference
text conjunctives (inter-sentence);
paratactic conjunctives;
hypotactic conjunctives
Lexical and textual cohesion

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

recurrence
partial recurrence
Parallelism
Paraphrase
collocation
hyponymy / meronimy
synonymy / antonimy

functional sentence
perspective *


ellipsis


information structure
substitution
intonation
*Functional sentence
perspective
• This designation suggests that sentence
elements can “function” by setting the
knowledge they activate into a
“perspective” of importance or newness. In
many languages, for instance, elements
conveying important, new, or unexpected
material are reserved for the latter part of
the sentence
• GIVEN= what you –listener/reader– already
know about, or have access to.
• NEW= what I –speaker/writer– am asking you –
listener/reader – to attend to.