Introduction to Text Linguistics

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Cohesion and Coherence

Text linguistics is largely concerned with cohesion, understanding how texts are put together, and coherence, which is how the construction of a text develops and affects meaning and interpretation. In general, an analysis of cohesion will consider the kinds of phrase structures, references, tropes, and other linguistic devices that make up the "surface" elements of a text. An analysis for coherence will attempt to understand how these elements are put together to develop a text's meaning. Together, these can largely be thought of as the internal mechanics of a text.

Your reception and understanding of a particular text is largely dependent upon your experience of other texts you have encountered. This includes making sense of analogies, identifying genres or forms, and recognizable social conventions. This notion can be reasonably extended to include your prior experience with language itself.

Your interpretation of a text may largely depend upon your knowledge of the text's historical or social context. Additionally, the way you interact with a text may differ depending upon the situation in which you experience it. For example, you will interact differently with a satirical essay from the 18th century, which you will read deeply in order to understand the speaker's use of irony, than when you interact with a web page, which you will probably only scan to retrieve needed information.

The analysis of any text will need to consider pertinent information about who wrote it, for what purpose, and for what kind of audience. For example, a speech delivered to Parliament by the Prime Minister will have a different set of intentions and be received differently than when the same speech is delivered by a comedic actor in a parody sketch.

For a text to exist it must be both intended and accepted as such; in other words, it must be recognizable as something which you are meant to read. This is a text's intentionality, or its purposive "aboutness." Some textual analysts distinguish between intentionality and an author's intentions, which is her specific intended meaning. You can read and interpret a text successfully without ever being told what the author intended to mean; indeed, it may be that a text's exact meaning is radically unknowable by anyone but the author. Some textual analysts argue that it is not necessary to consider an author's intentions at all; the text can be read in a variety of different ways regardless of how the author intended it to be read, and each of these readings will yield its own valid insights and observations.

Text linguistics is utilized primarily by academics across a variety of disciplines. For example, anthropologists may use it to help them better understand the role of texts in a given culture, such as what kinds of texts are used for rituals and what those rituals mean. Linguists may use it to better understand the structures of languages. Sociologists use text linguistics to understand how people relate through their language and how they make use of particular kinds of written texts in their social interactions. Finally, literary critics use text linguistics to understand how texts create meaning, and how those meanings can provide insights into other aspects of culture and society.