The seven standards of textuality

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The seven standards of textuality
Corso diLingua Inglese 3
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• What distinguish texts  is the quality of
  textuality
• Textuality is the result of seven factors and
  depends on both the writer and the reader to
  varying degrees
• COHESION and COHERENCE are text-centred notions,
  designating operations directed at the text
  materials.
• Cohesion concerns the ways in which the
  components of the surface text (the actual words
  we hear or see) are mutually connected within a
  sequence (de Beaugrande Dressler 19813).
• Coherence on the other hand concerns the ways in
  which the components of the textual world, i.e.
  the concepts and relations which underlie the
  surface text are mutually accessible and
  relevant. 

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The remaining standards of textuality are
user-centred, concerning the activity of textual
communication by the producers and receivers of
texts

• Intentionality concerns the text producers
  attitude that the set of occurrences should
  constitute a cohesive and coherent text
  instrumental in fulfilling the producers
  intentions.
• Acceptability concerns the receivers attitude
  that the set of occurrences should constitute a
  cohesive and coherent text having some use or
  relevance for the receiver.
• Informativity concerns the extent to which the
  occurrences of the text are expected vs.
  unexpected or known vs. unknown/uncertain.
• Situationality concerns the factors which make a
  text relevant to a situation of occurrence. 
• Intertextuality concerns the factors which make
  the utilisation of one text dependent upon
  knowledge of one or more previously encountered
  texts.

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COHESION

• The ties that bind a text together.
• Halliday and Hasan define two general categories
  of cohesion
• grammatical cohesion (substitution, ellipsis,
  conjunction, reference)
• lexical cohesion (reitreration and collocation. 

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Grammatical cohesionREFERENCE

• The semantic relation that ensures the
  continuity of meaning in a text.
• It includes items that cannot be interpreted in
  their own right, but which make reference to
  something else for their interpretation.
• Ex Doctor Foster went to Gloucester in a shower
  of rain. He stepped in a puddle right up to his
  middle and never went there again
• Exophoric reference Reference to items outside
  the text
• Endophoric reference Reference to items within
  the text
• Cataphoric Forward pointing (This is not good
  news for any of you. You are all fired.)
• Anaphoric Backward pointing (John came in. He did
  x, he did )

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Grammatical cohesionSUBSTITUTION

• A grammatical relation, where one linguistic item
  substitutes for a longer one. The substitute item
  is therefore interpretable only by reference to
  the original longer item.
• Nominal s. (one, ones, the same
• Verbal s. (do) It might rain but I hope it
  doesnt
• Clausal s. (they say so)

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Grammatical cohesionELLIPSIS

• It is similar to substitution, except that in the
  case of the ellipsis the substitution is by
  nothing.
• Nominal s. (omission of the head of a noun
  phrase)
• Verbal s. (omission of the lexical verb)
• Clausal s. (ellipsis of large part of clauses)
• I voted for the Greens. Why?

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Grammatical cohesionCONJUNCTIONS

• Specific devices for linking one sentence to
  another
• Additive
• Adversative
• Causal
• Temporal
• James arrived and sat down.
• Im hungry but dont want to eat now.

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Lexical cohesion

• Lexical cohesion does not deal with grammatical
  or semantic connections but with connections
  based on the words used. It is achieved by
  selection of vocabulary, using semantically close
  items. Because lexical cohesion in itself carries
  no indication whether it is functioning
  cohesively or not, it always requires reference
  to the text, to some other lexical item to be
  interpreted correctly. There are two types of
  lexical cohesion
• reiteration
• collocation.

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Lexical cohesionREITERATION

• Reiteration includes
• repetition (often involving reference) A
  conference will be held on national environmental
  policy. At this conference the issue of
  salination will play an important role. 
• synonymy (often involving reference) A conference
  will be held on national environmental policy.
  This environmental symposium will be primarily a
  conference dealing with water.
• hyponymy (superordinate vs. subordinate concepts)
  We were in town today shopping for furniture. We
  saw a lovely table.
• metonymy (part vs. whole) At its six-month
  check-up, the brakes had to be repaired. In
  general, however, the car was in good condition.
• antonymy The old movies just dont do it anymore.
  The new ones are more appealing.
• Lahdenmäki (1989) calls these relations
  "(direct) synonym-type relations, since they all
  refer to another word which has the same referent
  (e.g. I met a man yesterday. The bastard stole
  all my money)".

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Lexical cohesionCOLLOCATION

• Collocation is any pair of lexical items that
  stand to each other in some recognisable
  lexico-semantic relation, e.g. "sheep" and
  "wool", "congress" and "politician", and
  "college" and "study".
• Red Cross helicopters were in the air
  continuously. The blood bank will soon be
  desperately in need of donors. The hedgehog
  scurried across the road. Its speed surprised me.
• Like in the case of synonymous reference,
  collocational relation exists without any
  explicit reference to another item, but now the
  nature of relation is different it is indirect,
  more difficult to define and based on
  associations in the readers mind
• (e.g. I looked into the room. The ceiling was
  very high). Interpretation of such relations is
  completely based on the knowledge of subject
  fields).

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Collocations

• words which tend to occur with other words.
• language
• first language, second language, foreign
  language, dead language, classical language,
  modern language, spoken language, written
  language, colloquial language, sign language,
  body language, legal or technical or scientific
  language speak a language, understand a
  language, learn a language, study a language etc.
  are all examples of collocations.
• A famous quotation on collocations by the
  linguist Firth You shall know a word for the
  company it keeps.

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Paragraphs are often highly cohesive entities.
The cohesive ties can stand out very clearly if
he sentences are shuffled into a random order.It
may even be possible to reconstitute the original
sequence solely by considering the nature of
these ties, as in the following case

• However, nobody had seen one for months.
• He thought he saw a shape in the bushes.
• Mary had told him about the foxes.
• John looked out of the window.
• Could it be a fox?

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Solution

• John looked out of the window
• He thought he saw a shape in the bushes
• Could it be a fox?
• Mary had told him about the foxes.
• However, nobody had seen one for months

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• This is the closing paragraph of Joyces short
  story A Painful Case. The sequence of pronouns,
  the anaphoric definite articles and the repeated
  phrases are the main cohesive features between
  the clauses and sentences. Several refer back to
  previous parts of the story, thus making this
  paragraph, out of context, impossible to
  understand.

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• He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of
  the engine pounding in his ears. He began to
  doubt the reality of what memory told him. He
  halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die
  away. He could not feel her near him in the
  darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited
  for some minutes listening. He could hear
  nothing the night was perfectly silent. He
  listened again perfectly silent. He felt that he
  was alone.

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• He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of
  the engine pounding in his ears. He began to
  doubt the reality of what memory told him. He
  halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die
  away. He could not feel her near him in the
  DARKNESS nor her voice touch his ear. He waited
  for some minutes listening. He could hear
  nothing the NIGHT was perfectly silent. He
  listened again perfectly silent. He felt that he
  was alone.

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Find out all the cohesive devices

• The first sign of the new man was the knock of
  the door, It was the landlady, knocking at Anns
  door, as shed thought, but on the other door,
  the one east of the bathroom. Knock, knock, kock
  then a pause, soft fotsteps, the sound of
  unlocking. Ann, who had been reading a book on
  canals, put it down and lit herself a cigarette.
  It wasnt that she tried to overhear in this
  house you couldnt help it.

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• Ambiguity in texts can derive from the workings
  of cohesion or the
• lack of cohesion

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COHERENCE

• The concepts and relationships expressed should
  be relevant to each other, thus enabling us to
  make plausible inferences about the underlying
  meaning.

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• In Text and Context, Teun A. van Dijk (p. 93)
  argues convincingly that coherence is a semantic
  property of discourse formed through the
  interpretation of each individual sentence
  relative to the interpretation of other
  sentences, with "interpretation" implying
  interaction between the text and the reader. One
  method for evaluating a text's coherence is
  topical structure analysis.
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• Coherence, the sub-surface feature of a text,
  concerns the ways in which the meanings within a
  text (concepts, relations among them and their
  relations to the external world) are established
  and developed. Some of the major relations of
  coherence are logical sequences, such as
  cause-consequence (and so), condition-consequence
  (if), instrument-achievement (by), contrast
  (however), compatibility (and), etc. Moreover, it
  is the general aboutness, i.e., the topic
  development which provides a text with necessary
  integrity even in the absence of overt links, a
  text may be perceived as coherent (i.e., as
  making sense), as in various lists, charts,
  timetables, menus. Contrarily, other types of
  texts are characterized by explicit cohesive
  structure signalling intricate logico-semantic
  relationships (scientific reports, legal texts)
  in literary works, cohesion may be
  programmatically suppressed in order to enhance
  readers enjoyment while discovering these links
  for themselves.

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Read the following and discuss them in terms of
cohesion and coherence

• A Have you seen Tom? B The black car is not
  here
• My father once bought a Lincoln. He did it by
  saving every penny he could. That car would be
  worth a fortune today. However, he sold it to
  help pay for my college education. Sometimes, I
  think Id rather have the Lincoln
• My father bought a Lincoln. The car driven by the
  police was red. That color doesnt suit her. She
  wrote three letters. However, a letter isnt as
  fast as an e-mail message and my mailing box is
  full of spam.
• The fear of the enemy upset our plans.