Introducing English Linguistics

KEY TERMS
CHAPTER PREVIEW

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The study of the effects of the linguistic context on language use is tied
very closely to the notion of text. While most theorists would agree that a
text is a structure larger than a sentence, the specifics of exactly how a
text should be defined is very “theory-dependent” (Titscher et al. 2000: 20).
For discourse analysts, a text is both a linguistic and sociocultural con-
struct. Thus, in the introductory section of The Handbook of Discourse
Analysis, the editors describe a text (or a discourse, as they call it) in both
linguistic and non-linguistic terms as being “anything beyond the sen-
tence ... [that involves] language use, and ... [that is the product of ] a broader
range of social practice that includes nonlinguistic and non-specific
instances of language” (Schiffrin, Tannen, and Hamilton 2003: 1). Within
this framework, a newspaper article, for instance, is not just a collection
of sentences structured and used in a way consistent with the standards
of journalistic English, but the result of social practices inherent within
the media in general. The cognitive psychologists Teun van Dijk and
Walter Kintsch do not consider the social dimension of texts at all in their
classic book Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (1983). Instead, they define
a text in purely cognitive terms as containing a microstructure and a
macrostructure: “the local structure of a text” vs. its “global structure”
(Kintsch 1998: 50). From this perspective, a newspaper article contains a
series of sentences tied together by various linguistic devices (its
microstructure) that are part of a larger structure containing a headline,
lead, and so forth (its macrostructure). And interpreting a newspaper arti-
cle requires readers to draw upon their knowledge of what constitutes a
newspaper article and how sentences are structured in such articles.
The linguists Michael A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan posit similar
notions of text to van Dijk and Kintsch’s, but take a functional rather than
a cognitive approach in their characterization of texts. For Halliday and
Hasan (1985: 52), a text is a functional unit because it represents “lan-
guage that is doing something in some context, as opposed to isolated
words or sentences.” To capture the functional nature of texts, they pro-
pose that texts have two main characteristics: