Introducing English Linguistics

unity of structure
and
unity of texture
. Unity of structure is closely associated with the notion
of 
register
. A newspaper article is part of the more general register of jour-
nalistic English, which contains many sub-registers, such as news
reportage, sports reportage, editorials, and features. Each of these sub-
registers contains texts with a similar overall structure and a set of lin-
guistic features (e.g. a certain kind of vocabulary or particular grammati-
cal constructions) that may be unique to the register or used differently in
the register than in other registers. As noted above, news reportage con-
tains a headline, lead, and so forth, and (additionally) numerous linguistic
constructions, such as the frequent use of proper nouns (the names of peo-
ple discussed in news stories) and relatively short sentences, since newspa-
pers have to appeal to a wide audience and must therefore avoid the kinds
of complex structures found in other registers, such as academic prose.
Introduction
80
INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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Texts have texture because they contain numerous linguistic markers
establishing what Halliday and Hasan (1985: 73) refer to as a “tie”: some lin-
guistic marker that links two parts of a text together. For instance, the short
excerpt below, taken from a spontaneous conversation, contains an initial
mention of book with various ties back to it as the text unfolds: two
instances of books as well as two instances of the third person pronoun them.
yeah, i think that it’s good practice to just kinda write questions in a