Text and discourse

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1229.

Levels of linguistic structure

Artefact and mentafact texts

Cohesion and text organisation: three ways of viewing the problem

Text and discourse

Levels of linguistic structure

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It is generally assumed in modern linguistics that human language is structurally organised. Language structures are levelled and this levelling may be compared with a many-storied building or with a pyramid. Generally speaking, we may assume that people produce sounds to make words, which are then combined into sentences according to the rules of grammar. Sentences are further on combined into texts, which are main units of interaction.

Verbal interaction (communication), either written or oral, always takes place in a certain context or communicative situation. This situation in its turn is embedded into the macro-context of interaction: cultural, social, economic political, historical, etc. In linguistics there are very many writers on this issue expressing different points of view [see, e.g., Гальперин 1981; Дейк 1989; Halliday 1961; Hoey 1991: 13-14, 213] but most of them agree that oral and written texts function in a certain discourse.

For practical reasons we will assume the following definitions of textand discourse:

Text is any verbalized (i.e. expressed by means of human language) communicative event performed via (i.e. by means of) human language, no matter whether this communication is performed in written or in oral mode.

It means that we will consider all complete pieces (chunks) of written or oral verbal communication to be texts. This is not the only one approach to the definition of text, as we will discuss later.

Discourse is a complex communicative phenomenon, which includes, besides the text itself, other factors of interaction (such as shared knowledge, communicative goals, cognitive systems of participants, their cultural competence, etc.), i.e. all that is necessary for successful production and adequate interpretation(comprehension and translation) of the text.

Therefore text is embedded into discourse and both of them are “materialized” in a communicative situation, which in its turn is embedded into the macro-context of interaction: cultural, social, economic, political, historical, religious, etc. The following diagram may graphically represent all the assumptions about levels of linguistic structure that were made above [Hoey 1991: 213]:

SITUATION	extra-textual features
	interaction/discourse

Discourse

FORM	syntax/grammar

Grammar