National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
MODULE FOUR APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS II
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- 66 3.0 MAIN CONTENT 3.1 What is Text
| MODULE FOUR APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS II Unit 1: Text Linguistics Unit 2: Grammatical Cohesion Unit 3: Lexical Cohesion Unit 1: Text Linguistics CONTENT 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Unit Objectives 3.1 What is Text 3.2 Textuality 3.3 Sentence Connection 3.4 Self-assessment Exercises 3.5 Cohesion and Coherence 4.0 Conclusion 5.0 Summary 6.90 Tutor-marked Assignment 7.0 Reference/Further Reading 1.0 INTRODUCTION In this Unit, we shall be looking at the practice in a school of thought within Discourse Analysis called Textlinguistics, whose sole aim is to examine written texts and how such texts are meaningful, and the linguistic resources used by writers to achieve meaning in written texts. With these in view, of central concern to us in this Unit are the concepts of text, textuality and cohesion and coherence in text. 2.0 UNIT OBJECTIVE At the end of this Unit, you should be able to do the following • define and identify what a text is • explain what it means for the sentences in a text to be connected • discuss the concepts of cohesion and coherence in written texts • identify texts that are coherent and the resources that are used for such coherence 66 3.0 MAIN CONTENT 3.1 What is Text A text can simply be described as a type of written or spoken discourse or a sequence of paragraphs that represents an extended unit of speech. A text is not just a random collection of sentences. A text must be meaningful, in the sense that the ideas of the communicator of the text must be understood by the communicatee. A text must be seen as a unified whole, whose meaning can be summarized. Halliday and Hasan (1976) describes a text as a semantic unit Typicaly in any text, every sentence except the first exhibits some form of cohesion with the preceding (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 292). Texts are classified into genres on the basis of the intent of the communicator. Although there are different ways of classifying texts, six text types are generally recognized , and they are recount, report, procedure, explanation, exposition, and experimental report. Each of these text types has different linguistic structures and features. For instance, a report is written in the past tense since it is an account of something the communicator had experienced sometime ago. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
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