The Communicative Unit
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ScribdTranslationsThe Communicative Unit
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ScribdTranslationsTHE COMMUNICATIVE UNIT: THE TEXT
By Claudia CISNEROS MENACHO
In the past, linguistics focused solely on the word and
the sentence, however, in classic cultures (Greece and Rome), in which rhetoric, the art
of persuasion, discourse was understood as the maximum unit of linguistic study. With
the development of linguistic studies broadened the perspective of the object of
study towards the text; setting aside the paragraph, the clause or the length of sentences.
Among the pioneers of this new vision of linguistic study, we have Meter.
Hartmann, who proposed the structural description of discourse as the subject of study; the
Constanza's group, which focused on the semantic coherence of discourse; and to Van Dijk,
who in his work 'Text and context. Semantics and pragmatics of discourse' raised this
new discipline taking into account concepts such as connection, macrostructure, coherence,
types of discourse, discourse pragmatics, etc., but setting aside the elements
semiotics. Later on, J. Lozano, C. Peña Marín, and G. Abril, taking into account all
The previous contributions manage to integrate semiotics and text theory, giving it a
epistemological foundation to this new discipline.
According to Umberto Eco, the text is a syntactic-semantic-pragmatic artifice whose
interpretation demand for the reader's interpretative cooperation. For M. Bakhtin, the text
it is an immediate reality, who also claims that where there is no text, there is also no
object of research and thought. Both sociolinguistics, social psychology and
theory of communication coincides in working with texts. The Tartu school conceives the
text as a coherent sign set.
The first studies aimed to scientifically explain whether the text had the
character of linguistic unit of study, as it was the sentence. For Mederos Martin the
the set of rules and principles of a given language is the competence of a listener
ideal speaker, therefore, the structure of the sentence is limited to grant it
character of linguistic unity; whereas in the text there is a direct relationship between the
real statements of the language, as well as the peculiar traits of the speaker in the statement
and in the context.
The initial models of a linguistics of the text had a purely
grammatical, a concept of the Chomskyan model, subsequently the concept of the
The linguistics of the text encompassed communicative competence. Nowadays, linguistics
consider the text as a basically communicative unit. For the linguistics of the text, the
language is the main means of human communication, this verbal activity has contribution
from Russian psychologists and psycholinguists such as Vygotsky, Luria, and Rubinstein, who
they conceive language as a form of communicative activity, that is, language in the
society and in the real world.