Text : Definition, Elaboration and Examples
- 1. Definition, Examples and Elaboration
- 2. Definition and Identification:Text A text can be defined as an actual use of language, as distinct from a sentence which is an abstract unit of linguistic analysis. We identify a piece of language as a text as soon as we recognize that it has been produced for a communicative purpose. We can identify a text as a purposeful use of language without necessarily being able to interpret it. What we do is to establish a reference by relating the text to the context in which it is located. The range of reference is not specified in the language itself.
- 3. Text: cont. We relate the text not only to the actual situational context in which we find it, but also to the abstract cultural context of what we know to be conventional. By relating the text to the context, we infer not only what the expression refers to, but also what its purpose is (prohibition, warning, etc.).
- 4. Text: Representation When we come across notices, labels, etc., we make sense of them by relating the language to the immediate perceptual context where they are located and to the conceptual context of our knowledge of how texts are designed to function. Texts serve an obvious utilitarian purpose (notices, labels, instructions). These are designed to be directly acted upon and to get things done.
- 5. Text: Elaboration Other texts, such as travel guides, information leaflets, newspaper articles, interviews, speeches, reports, poems and so on, serve a range of different social purposes: to give information, to express a point of view, shape opinion, provide entertainment, and so on.
- 6. Text: Identification All texts are use of language which are produced to refer to something for some purpose. We identify a stretch of language as a text when we recognize its intention. But recognizing a text is not the same as realizing its meaning. You may or may not know what is being referred to in a particular text, but fail to see what communicative purpose lies behind the reference. In case of simple texts (public notices), it will be a straightforward matter to match up the intention with interpretation, but in the case of more complex ones (newspaper articles) such matching can prove to be highly problematic.
- 7. Text: Cont. Texts serve an obvious utilitarian purpose (notices, labels, instructions). These are designed to be directly acted upon and to get things done. Other texts, such as travel guides, information leaflets, newspaper articles, interviews, speeches, reports, poems and so on, serve a range of different social purposes: to give information, to express a point of view, shape opinion, provide entertainment, and so on.
- 8. Spoken and Written Texts Texts are the perceptible traces of the process, not itself open to direct perception, of mediating message. In conversation, these traces are typically fragmented and ephemeral, and disappear as soon as they are produced to serve their immediate discourse purpose. Participants in spoken interaction produce and process texts as they go along.
- 9. Spoken and Written Texts: Cont. Written texts are not jointly constructed and construed on line in this way. They are designed and recorded unilaterally in the act of production by one of the participants, the write, as a completed expression of the intended message. The mediation is displayed and delayed and this obviously will often make a convergence between intention and interpretation more difficult to achieve.
- 10. Written and Spoken Texts When people communicate, they do not only produce texts. They make use not only of language, but of paralanguage (tone of voice, varying stress, pauses, and so on.) What they say is accompanied by facial expression or gesture, as part of the message they intend to get across. In written communication, too, how a text is given a particular shape by choice of type face, or its arrangement of a page, may suggest significance, over and above what its signifies linguistically.
- 11. Written and Spoken Text: Cont. It may be multi-modal in that the text is accompanied by, and related to, other modes of communication (pictures, diagrams, charts, and so on.) A text would then signal its own meaning, whatever the context or purpose of its production . The encoded meanings are semantic meanings. In using a language, we not only put this knowledge on display, but also act upon it as appropriate to our communicative intentions. We always make this semantic meaning serve a pragmatic purpose.
- 12. Conclusion When people communicate with each other, they draw on the semantic resources encoded in their language to key into context they assume to be shared so as to enact a discourse. The linguistic trace of this process is the text. In the case of conversation, the text is jointly produced as the discourse proceeds by overt interaction, and it typically disappears once it has served its purpose. In the case of writing, the text is unilaterally produced and remains as a permanent record.