Text (literary theory)
Text (from the Latin texere: weave / braid ) denotes the non-scientific parlance, a defined, cohesive, usually written utterance, in a broad sense not written, but writable language information (such as a song, movie, or an improvised theater performance ).
From a linguistic point of view, a text is the linguistic form of a communicative act. Texts will be determined on the one hand by pragmatic, so situational, "text external " features, on the other hand by the linguistic, "text internal " characteristics. In the language and communication science many different text definitions exist side by side, separated from each other using various Textualitätskriterien text and " non- text ". Broader text terms also include illustrations or elements of nonverbal communication (eg facial expressions and gestures ) in the text. Under certain circumstances, even a pure image sequence are considered as text if so recognizable a communicative function is fulfilled. The concept of " discontinuous " text in the field of language teaching includes texts that are not written consecutively and partly non- linguistic means use, such as forms, tables and lists, graphs and charts.
Text and Font
Texts can be displayed using a font whose characters encode phonemes, syllables or words or terms. Different cultures use different alphabets for this purpose. Through the introduction of writing an opportunity to create texts, such as history, stories and legends to archive for posterity. Much of the historical knowledge comes from written records that have been archived or were randomly obtained. Texts from cultures with a written tradition traditions differ in their construction of texts from cultures in which the oral tradition plays a major role. In the humanities are cultures from which no written records have survived, attributed to the pre-and early history. Thus, although indirect, but nevertheless very important definition of the object of the science of history is given by the tradition of texts.
Textualitätskriterien and text definitions
As mentioned above, leads to a more complex, scientific observation definition and description of tests. The property of "Text - being" is called textuality, the linguistic study of texts is text linguistics. This discipline provides various Textualitätskriterien available.
Robert -Alain de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler presented before 1981 a number of such criteria. These criteria are based on one hand on the characteristics of the text itself (cohesion, ie formal cohesion and coherence, so logical cohesion), on the other hand, the characteristics of a communication situation from which the text in question involves or in which it is used ( intentionality, acceptability informativity, situationality ).
Cohesion and coherence are among the most widely accepted Textualitätskriterien, but even here there are exceptions: There are quite texts, which consist of unrelated words or even sounds, some of them up to mere noise reduced audio paintings, and, on the whole, yet complex interpretable, its own kind of textuality reach (eg Dada poems).
Here is the situation-related Textualitätskriterien come into play: texts are also determined that a transmitter it produces with a certain intention (intention ) and / or a receiver accepts it as such. Whether a text for a particular receiver is acceptable, in turn, strongly depends on whether these make a connection of the received utterance with his situation, ie " install " the text in his imagination can ( situationality ), and whether the text for it is informative, so in a certain ratio contains the expected and unexpected, familiar and new elements. To return to the example of the Dada poem: An obvious cohesive or coherent text can be acceptable as such when the receiver assumes that the intention of the transmitter requires a high degree of surprising or non-standard elements in the text.
The intertextuality as a last resort after the Textualitätskriterien de Beaugrande and Dressler is the property of a text to stand with other texts in conjunction and to refer to them. In literary texts, this is often done through deliberate references and citations, intertextuality can be expressed, for example, but can also be found in the fact that a use text meets the usual conventions of his text type.
The individual listed here Textualitätskriterien are controversial in their interpretation by de Beaugrande / Dressler part. It is generally accepted that a text has a recognizable communicative function, which is determined by the communicative intent of the sender and the expectations of the receiver so that it is defined as an expression and thematically oriented, that is, has a minimum core content. Such a text definition of communicative- pragmatic perspective offers Susanne Göpferich:
" A text is a thematically and / or functionally oriented, coherent linguistic or verbal- figural complex, which was created with a certain [ ... ] communication intention [ ... ] met a recognizable communicative function [ ... ] and a forms of content and functional self-contained unit. "