Text linguistics

Much attention has been given to the sentence as a self-contained unit, and not enough has been given to studying how sentences may be used in connected stretches of language. It is essentially the presentation of language as sets of sentences. Text is extremely significant in communication because people communicate not by means of individual words or fragments of sentences in languages, but by means of texts. It is also the basis of various disciplines such as law, religion, medicine, science, politics, et cetera. 'A text is an extended structure of syntactic units such as words, groups, and clauses and textual units that is marked by both coherence among the elements and completion ... a non-text consists of random sequences of linguistic units such as sentences, paragraphs, or sections in any temporal and/or spatial extension.' (Werlich, 1976: 23) 'A naturally occurring manifestation of language, i. e. as a communicative language event in a context. The surface text is the set of expressions actually used; these expressions make some knowledge explicit, while other knowledge remains implicit, though still applied during processing.' (Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981: 63) ' used in linguistics to refer to any passage- spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence; and it is not defined by its size A text is best regarded as a semantic unit; a unit not of form but of meaning.' (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 1–2) 'A text is made up of sentences, but there exist separate principles of text-construction, beyond the rules for making sentences.' (Fowler, 1991: 59) ' a set of mutually relevant communicative functions, structured in such a way as to achieve an overall rhetorical purpose.' (Hatim and Mason, 1990) Text linguists generally agree that text is the natural domain of language, but they still differ in their perspectives of what constitutes a text. This variance is mainly due to the different methods of observations of different linguists, and as such, the definition of text is not yet concrete.