Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

Beaugrande & Dressler’s textlinguistic model

Beaugrande does not believe in the power of cohesion alone in a text. He proposes six standards of textuality to be the legitimate basis of the actualization and utilization of texts, namely, cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertextuality. These standards are interrelated and their interaction is what makes communication possible in a text. According to Beaugrande and Dressler (1981: 3),
a text will be defined as a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality. If any of these standards is not considered to have been satisfied, the text will not be communicative.
The seven standards of textuality have the following characteristics:
Cohesion: This results from “the grammatical dependencies which help to make the different parts of a text stick together in a cohesive manner” (Ibid).
Coherence: By coherence it is assumed that a text cannot convey a meaning unless there is an interaction between world knowledge and text knowledge; i.e., there should be an interaction between what people have in mind and what the text presents as knowledge. Intentionality and acceptability: Even if a text is cohesive and coherent, it “must be intended to be a text and accepted as such in order to be utilized in communicative interaction” (Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 113). In other words, the producer of the text must intend to contribute towards some goal (e.g. giving/demanding information) and the receiver of the text must accept that it does indeed fulfill some such purpose. Intentionality, then, concerns the writer’s/speaker’s attitude that a given text is intended to be cohesive and coherent so that it fulfils the producer’s goal; whereas, acceptability concerns the reader/listener’s attitude that a
given text should be accepted as cohesive and coherent.

Informativity: This concerns the degree of expectedness in a given text; i.e. the extent to which a message is new to the receiver.

Situationality: This concerns the factors which make a text relevant to the situation of occurrence.
Intertextuality: This is about the situation in which a text makes sense since it depends on previously encountered texts.

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