What is TEXT?

What is TEXT? 

Halliday and Hasan (1976:1-2) mention that text is a semantic unit. He said further about the text as: “[A term] used in linguistics to refer to any passage-spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole […] A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence; and it is not defined by its size […] A text is best regarded as a SEMANTIC unit; a unit not of form but of meaning.” 

Moreover, Halliday said that the text is the language people produce and react to, what they say and write, and read and listen to, in the course of daily life.…. The term covers both speech and writing… it may be language in action, conversation, telephone talk, debate, … public notices, ... intimate monologue or anything else (1975:123). 

Etymologically, text comes from a metaphorical use of the Latin verb text are 'weave', suggesting a sequence of sentences or utterances 'interwoven' structurally and semantically. As a count noun it is commonly used in linguistics and stylistics to refer to a sequential collection of sentences or utterances which form a unity by reason of their linguistic COHESION and semantic COHERENCE. e.g. a scientific article; a recipe; poem; public lecture; etc. Moreover, text is linguistics realization of proportional meanings as 2 connected passage that is situationally relevant. The following are the characteristics of the text:

- Essentially semantic unit as a form of interaction 

- Cohesive and coherence; not random but connected 

- Spoken or written; mode of linguistics realization 

- Of any length

- Create and/created by context (situationally relevant). 

Werlich (1976) says that a text is an extended structure of syntactic units (i.e. text as super-sentence) such as words, groups, and clauses and textual units that is marked by both coherence among the elements and completion, whereas a non-text consists of random sequences of linguistic units such as sentences, paragraphs, or sections in any temporal and/or spatial extension. In its social-semantic perspective, text is an object of social exchange of meanings. As such, it is embedded in a context of situation. The context of situation is the semi-socio-cultural environment in which the text unfolds. 

Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) define a text as a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality, they are: 

1.Cohesion 

Cohesion concerns the ways in which the components of the surface text are connected within a sequence.

2.Coherence 

Coherence related to the ways in which concepts and relations, which underlie the surface text, are linked, relevant and used, to achieve efficient communication. 

• A concept is a cognitive content which can be retrieved or triggered with a high degree of consistency in the mind.

• Relations are the links between concepts within a text, with each link identified with the concept that it connects to.

3.Intentionality, 

Intentionality refers to the text producer's attitude and intentions as the text producer uses cohesion and coherence to attain a goal specified in a plan. 

4.Acceptability 

Acceptability concerns to the text receiver's attitude that the text should constitute useful or relevant details or information such that it is worth accepting. 

5.Informativity

Informativity is the extent to which the contents of a text are already known or expected as compared to unknown or unexpected. 

6.Situationally 

Situationally refers to the factors which make a text relevant to a situation of occurrence. 

7.Intertextuality

Intertextuality concerns with the factors which make the utilization of one text dependent upon knowledge of one or more previously encountered text. If a text receiver does not have prior knowledge of a relevant text, communication may break down because the understanding of the current text is obscured. 

Without any of which, the text will not be communicative. Non-communicative texts are treated as non-texts. 

Most linguists agree on the classification into five text-types: narrative, descriptive, argumentative, instructive, and comparison/contrast (also called expositive). Some classifications divide the types of texts according to their function. Others differ because they take into consideration the topic of the texts, the producer and the addressee, or the style. The following figure display the position of text.