Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ahmad Nadhif
(a) Text
• It refers to any passage, spoken or written,
of whatever length, that does form a
unified whole.
• In systemic terms, a text is a unit of
meanings, a unit which expresses
simultaneously, ideational, interpersonal,
and textual meanings.
Is this a text?
Texture
• It is the property that distinguishes text
from non-text. It is what holds the clauses
of a text together to give them unity.
• Texture involves the interaction of two
components: coherence and cohesion.
Coherence
• It is text’s relationship to its extra-textual
context (the social and cultural context of
its occurrence).
Cohesion
• It is the way the elements within a text
bind it together as “a unified whole”.
Two Types of Coherence
• Registerial coherence: the situation in which
all the clauses of the text could occur: 1) the
domain the text is focusing on (its field), 2) the
roles the interactants are playing (its tenor),
and 3) the way language is tied to the
experience its commenting on (its mode).
• Generic coherence: a unified purpose
motivating the language, usually expressed
through a predictable generic or schematic
structure.
Three types of Cohesion
• Reference: How the writer/speaker introduces
participants and then keeps track of them
once they are in the text.
• Lexical Cohesion: How the writer/speaker
uses lexical items and event sequences to
relate the text consistently to its area of focus
or its field.
• Conjunctive cohesion: how the writer
creates and expresses logical relationships
between parts of a text.
Reference
• Homophoric reference: taken from the
general context of culture. (e.g. How hot
the sun is today)
• Exophoric reference: taken from the
immediate context of situation. (E.g if A
and B are at the same place and the same
time and A says to B, “Put it down next to
her”.)
• Endophoric reference: taken from
elswhere within the text itself. (e.g. She
didn’t hear the story)
Three types of Endophoric
Reference
• Anaphoric reference
• Cataphoric reference
• Esphoric reference.
Anaphoric reference
• It is when the referent has appeared at an
earlier point in the text.