Cohesion and text organization: three ways of viewing the problem

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1060.

There are several important features of text, however the main one is cohesion (когезія, зв'язність) [see Galperin 1981: 73-85; Hoey 1991: 3-25].

Cohesion may be defined as the way certain words or grammatical features of a sentence can connect that sentence to its predecessors (and successors) in a text.

Therefore, cohesion helps to understand a text as a whole, to comprehend its topic and to interpret (as well as to translate) text correctly. This feature of text is very important for translators and interpreters as they never translate separate words or sentences but deal with complete texts (oral or written). Lack of cohesion (which sometimes happens with certain speakers and authors) is the most serious challenge for interpreters and translators. Thus cohesion is a property of text as of a linguistic unit.

There exists also another category – coherence (когерентність, цілісність), which is understood as a quality assigned to text by a reader or listener, and is a measure of the extent to which the reader or listener finds that the text holds together and makes sense as a unity. Therefore, coherence is a subjective category because certain texts may be found coherent by one reader and incoherent by another one.

In modern linguistics there are three ways of viewing text organization.

The first is that text has no organization whatsoever and is just a fragment of continuous speech process [see, e.g. Кривоносов 1986]. This view seems to be losing ground, mainly because it contradicts everyday experience.

The second is that text has some organization, but that this organization does not have the status of structure, i.e. does not permit to make predictive statements about the text [Hoey 1991]. However, if one looks closely at the British approach to text, one will see that this approach is rather structure-oriented, though, perhaps, aimed more at practical interpretation of texts and not at lengthy theoretical discussions of their structural nature.

The thirdway of viewing text organization is that text does permit full structural description, can be subject to prediction and computer processing (see works of most European (continental) and American authors, such as T.A. van Dijk, J.Grimes, M.A.K.Halliday and R.Hasan, R.E.Longacre, K.L.Pike and many others). Some authors even claim that any text functions as a “cybernetic system” of speech communication [Брандес, Провоторов 2003].

For the purposes of our analysis we will recognize the third approach [Maksimov 1992] as the one that:

(a) fits into modern theories of semiotics and text linguistics;

(b) fits into modern practice of computer-assisted text processing and existing practices of designing computer software;

(c) satisfies the needs of text analysis in the process of translation.

Indeed, if words in sentences are connected in a certain way with each other and sentences are connected to make up texts, than we may say that there is some structure in a text, which can be comprehended by readers or listeners and properly rendered (translated or interpreted) by means of another language.

1.4. Artefact and mentafact texts

Texts have to be classified in some way. One of the approaches to text classification we will describe below [see: Аспекты 1982; Maksimov 1992; Sinclair 1986].

All texts can be placed on a horizontal scale which shows different functions of texts, the way people use and interpret them, as well as different approaches to translation of texts.

At the one extreme end of the scale there are texts, which demand almost verbal interpretation. Such texts are used either for “changing” the real world or for reporting statements about it, i.e. for “reflecting” the real world. Examples are: texts of constitutions, statutes, laws, international treaties and agreements, conventions, business contracts, protocols, business letters, rules and regulations, etc. (i.e., texts that “change the world”), academic texts of science, medicine and other fields of research which inform the reader about the results of academic studies and outline ways of practical implementation of these results, various reports, news items, etc. (i.e., texts that “reflect the world”). All of these texts are non-fictional texts, which may be labelled as artefact texts.

The second group of texts, which can be placed on the other extreme end of the scale, are those texts, which influence the real world indirectly, through artistic images, and hidden knowledge, which the reader has to infer from them. These are mostly fictional texts of poetry, drama and prose, which may be labelled as mentafact texts. These texts neither change (like texts of laws), nor reflect (like academic texts or texts of news items) the real material world, but describe the fictional world, created in the imagination of the author.

This classification reflects the difference between the communicative function (artefact texts) and artisticfunction (mentafact texts) of the human language.

Other types of texts are texts of the publicistic (or rather “mass media”) style, including editorials, journalistic articles, essays, TV and radio commentaries, as well as texts of memoirs, public and political speeches, etc., i.e. texts which deal with the facts of the real world but have certain linguistic features of fictional texts (emotional colouring, author's evaluation of the events, the use of stylistic devices and expressive means of the language – everything which is aimed at “persuasion” of the addressee). These texts can be placed between the artefacts and mentafacts in the so-called “grey zone” as they perform persuasive function of human speech. Graphically this distinction looks as follows: