THE DEFINITION OF THE TEXT

ThewordThe text comes from the Latin word "textus" which means "to weave, to intertwine".

The text is the maximum unit of communication and conveys a complete message. Everything
text is a statement or a set of statements with unitary meaning produced with a
communicative intention in a specific context and with a certain organization
syntactic.

The text is both the oral and written product, as long as it constitutes a
total sense unit, regardless of its dimensions - a sentence could be in
often a text - and whatever its communicative intention - the important thing is that the
the text is appropriate to the situation and has a correct organization with
the end of creating total communication.

The text is usually divided into paragraphs that are enclosed between a word with a letter
Capital letter at the beginning of a line, and a period at the end.

General principles of the text:

The text is not just a linguistic unit, but an event of

human action, interaction, communication, and cognition.
The main source of data is natural texts.
The analysis of texts is rich and expansive.
4. In the research of current texts, the researcher has to get involved.
with the texts.
5. The reasons for conducting textual research with epistemological interests
Considering the relationships between texts and society are increasingly
most important.
6. The linguistics of the text has an interdisciplinary perspective.

SOME DEFINITIONS OF TEXT

Authors:
"Coherent sign set. Any set that bears an integral meaning"
"The singular semiotic formation, closed in on itself, endowed with a meaning and a function"
indivisible integral
(J. Lotman, Structure of the Artistic Text)
The text is a unit of language in use.
A text is not a sentence, but larger, it is something that differs from the sentence in
class." It's better to understand the text as a semantic unit."
A text does not consist of sentences; it is made up of or encoded by sentences. If it
We understand this way, we will not expect to find the same type of structural integration between
the parts of a text like the one we find between the parts of a sentence
(Halliday Hassan, Cohesion in English, 1976, p.2)
The delimitation of the text simply depends on the communicative intention of
speaker, of what he conceives and wants as a set of linguistic units
linked to a total conglomerate of communicative intention.
The key term in the definition and textual delimitation [is] textual coherence.
(Petöfi García Berrio, Linguistics of the Text and Literary Criticism, 1978, pp. 5657)
Text is the fundamental communicative linguistic unit, a product of activity.
human verbal, which always has a social character; it is characterized by its closure
semantic and communicative, as well as for its deep and superficial coherence, due to
the speaker's (communicative) intention to create a complete text and its structuring
through two sets of rules: those of the textual level and those of the system of the
language.
(E. Bernárdez, Introduction to Text Linguistics, 1982, p. 85)

Bernárdez
Introduction to the linguistics of the text (1982: 76) From his point of view, to define
text must take into account the following factors:
Communicative character: it is an action aimed at communicating.
(2) Pragmatic character: it occurs in an extralinguistic context, with interlocutors and
constant references to the context
Structured character: it is an internal organization based on rules that ensure the
meaning.

According to Halliday (1982: 94) the text is "... the basic linguistic unit, which is manifested in
the surface as discourse.
According to van Dijk (1993:32) it is:
... an abstract theoretical construction that underlies what is normally called a
discourse. Those expressions that can be assigned textual structure are, therefore,
acceptable speeches of the language–at this level of explanation of acceptability–this
Yes, they are well-formed and interpretable.
Adopting van Dijk's position, we consider the text as an abstraction and of
In no way do we conceive it as a physical object, since it is a fact.
specific communicative and as such constituted by a communication channel and an act
or some acts of language that update this channel. What happens is that the
interlocutors relate not to the isolated text, but to a support or bearer of
text - for example a book, or an acoustic flow - which in turn identifies it with a
specific function and for this reason the text is commonly confused with its bearer.
In recent years, Yuri Lotman (1993, cited by Pardo, 1995:90) has expanded the
the concept of text based on the developments of Semiotics. For Lotman, the text is
plurisemic, a finite, structured, coded, and open unit that in the system
culture serves two functions: 'the proper transmission of meanings and the
generation of new meanings. This proposal of functional dualism of texts in
a cultural system dilutes the ideas advocated by transmissionist approaches and a
Bakhtinian approach to communication. According to Werstch (1993:95), from the perspective of
Lotman, "both functions of the text can be found in any domain
sociocultural, but one or the other dominates in certain areas of activity or in
general, during certain periods of history.
From this point of view, the text is not restricted to verbal signs, so a
ballet, a painting, a symphony, etc. can be considered texts. Given that the text
materializes a language, everything that is relevant for that language is also so
for the text and should be considered as a component of its meaning. In this way,
the textual analysis, and therefore of the language or languages that constitute the text,
allows the interpretation of cultural phenomena that are not so evident to him
man) since they are secondary systems, generators of meaning, that intercept and
they coexist with primary systems, such as natural languages" (Pardo, 1995:92).
Defined in this way, this concept makes it necessary for us to ask a question whose
we consider fundamental to guide our research work:
Does a text underlie all discursive acts?
To this concern, authors like Ryan (1979:259) respond negatively. This author
for example, it exposes its differentiation between types of discourse and types of text, which
illustrate with the example of the conversation. For her, this is a type of discourse, but not
a text, since "it is not governed by conditions of global coherence, and therefore
presents an ambiguous status regarding the notion of text. The only coherence that
what is required in real life conversations is vaguely linear: it maintains the
concatenation of sentences and turns, but without preventing speakers from changing the subject
and they interrupt each other at certain moments of the exchange.
Contrary to this position, van Dijk (1993:20-23) includes the conversation among the
possible texts of a language when conceiving grammaticality and coherence as
relatives, that is to say, context-dependent: coherence may be constituted by
the sentence sequence–linear coherence–, by the global text–global coherence–, or
for the adequacy of the speech act achieved through emission-coherence
pragmatics - as we will elaborate further on. In this way, the condition of
coherence would not be so much in the text, but rather depends on the semantic interpretation
and the pragmatics assigned by a reader/listener, in which '...a reader establishes the
coherence not only based on the propositions expressed in the discourse, but also on
basis of those stored in its memory, that is, the propositions of its
knowledge
(Ibid.: 40).
1 Taken from module No. 4 'The school and written language', written by Gloria.
Rincón B. Teacher Improvement Program in Mother Tongue, MEN, ICETEX,
UNIVALLE, 1998.
univocal in the sense that it presupposes that "the codes of the speaker and the listener
completely coincides" (Cited by Werstch, 1993: 98), and dialogical in that it conceives
the text as "a device for thinking". This duality is also strongly linked
to the Bakhtinian notion of authoritarian text (predominance of the first function) or of
persuasive text (predominance of the second function).
Halliday (1982: 160) also shares the previous position in that the text is the
linguistic form of social interaction... "is encapsulated in a context of
situation, for which, in the normal course of things, a text is not something that has a
beginning and an end; the exchange of meanings is an ongoing process implicit in
every human interaction, is not deconstructed, but it is seamless, and everything that is
You can observe a periodicity in which the texture maxima alternate with the
minimums: moments of great cohesion with moments of relatively continuity
scarce. The discretion of a literary text is not typical of texts in general
(Ibid.:179).
Since we share the viewpoint of these last two authors, we will refer to
texts whether oral or written; texts that underlie discourses
conversational or not.
Considering our interest in written language, we will now attempt
approach a characterization of the texts that allows us to detect how they
they are structured as such and how in these differences the presence of the
oral or written language.