Introducing English Linguistics

Further reading
See J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (Oxford University Press, 1962) for an early discussion of the
notion of pragmatic vs. grammatical meaning. A description of speech act theory can be found in J. Searle,
Expression and Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 1979). The cooperative principle is outlined in H. P.
Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). For a general overview
of the field of pragmatics, see S. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, 1983). Two differing per-
spectives on politeness are presented in P. Brown and S. Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language
Usage (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and G. N. Leech,  Principles of Pragmatics (London: Longman,
1983). A discussion of social variables and other issues from a sociolinguistic perspective can be found in
many of the chapters in F. Coulmas, ed., The Handbook of Sociolinguistics (Oxford and Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell Publishers, 1998).

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C H A P T E R
The structure
of English texts
4
The previous chapter described how the social context in
which communication takes place affects the form and
usage of the words and sentences that people speak and
write. This chapter focuses on a different kind of context,
the linguistic context, and how it also affects the way that
language is structured and used. When speakers or writers
create a 
text
, the linguistic resources that they use – where
words are placed in a sentence, for instance, or how what
they say or write is organized – are very dependent upon a
number of considerations. For instance, if two individuals
are engaging in a casual conversation, what they say will be
divided into speaker turns: one person will speak, followed
by another, with each person observing conventions for
how speakers take turns speaking when they converse.
Coherence
Cohesion
Communicative
dynamism
End-focus
New and given
(old) information
Register
Text
Unity of structure
Unity of texture