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What is text?
Text is something that happens, in the form of talking or writing, listening or reading. When we analyse it, we analyse the product of this process, and the term 'text' is usually taken as referring to the product...
Halliday 1994: 311
In lay usage (i.e. non-specialist usage), the term text is generally applied exclusively to written material and sometimes more specifically to a course book, for example: a teacher might ask her students to bring their 'texts' to the next lesson. When we talk about text in this module (and, for the most part, in the other modules of the course), we mean it in the technical sense in which it is used in discourse analysis and text linguistics, with a much broader significance than the popular meaning of the term.
For us, and henceforth that includes you, dear Participant, a text means any stretch of language in use, of any length, whether spoken or written. In this sense, the huge novel War and Peace is a text. Milton's' sonnet On his Blindness is a text. Willis and Willis's Challenge and Change is a text. What you are reading now is a text. But so is a bill, or a receipt, or an advertisement or a road sign reading: Halt. Or a note on a door reading: Closed. And a university lecture is a text. Also the verbal exchange that takes place when you buy something. Or an exchange of greetings: 'Hello, there!' 'Hi!'. Or a single cry: Help!
We may speak of a complete text to refer to the whole of the language event (for example, a whole sales transaction, a whole research paper, an entire letter, an entire book, a complete lecture); or we may speak of a text fragment (a paragraph from a book, five minutes of an hour-long lecture, and so on). But the distinction between a text and a text fragment is not very precise, and often the term text may be applied to any sample of actual language regardless of its completeness.
Further, the term text may be applied to the ongoing discourse process (the sales transaction as it occurs, the lecture as it is being given, etc.) or to a written or electronic record of the event (a transcript or a tape-recording of the lecture).
Discourse
One brief point of terminology. There is considerable variation in how terms such as text and discourse are used in linguistics. Sometimes the terminological variation signals important conceptual distinctions, but often it does not and terminological debates are usually of little interest.
Stubbs 1996: 4
Some people make a distinction between text and discourse; some don't. Unfortunately those who do make a distinction are not always in agreement about what the distinction is. Like Stubbs in the citation above, I am not very interested in attempts to draw a line between what is meant by text and what by discourse. In practice, I think I usually use the term discourse when I am speaking about the communicative process and text when I am talking about the product, but I do not know how consistent I am in this practice, and I would not wish to prescribe it.
I can honestly say that in all the years I have been engaged in discourse analysis and in teaching the subject, I have never found this to be a significant problem for myself or for my students. It has to be accepted that terminology is not very fixed in our field of work (by which I mean here all aspects of English language teaching and linguistics), and some degree of uncertainty is just something we have to learn to live with.
Discourse
One brief point of terminology. There is considerable variation in how terms such as text and discourse are used in linguistics. Sometimes the terminological variation signals important conceptual distinctions, but often it does not and terminological debates are usually of little interest.
Stubbs 1996: 4
Some people make a distinction between text and discourse; some don't. Unfortunately those who do make a distinction are not always in agreement about what the distinction is. Like Stubbs in the citation above, I am not very interested in attempts to draw a line between what is meant by text and what by discourse. In practice, I think I usually use the term discourse when I am speaking about the communicative process and text when I am talking about the product, but I do not know how consistent I am in this practice, and I would not wish to prescribe it.
I can honestly say that in all the years I have been engaged in discourse analysis and in teaching the subject, I have never found this to be a significant problem for myself or for my students. It has to be accepted that terminology is not very fixed in our field of work (by which I mean here all aspects of English language teaching and linguistics), and some degree of uncertainty is just something we have to learn to live with
Data and corpus
For discourse analysts, texts constitute potential data. Data are the phenomena under investigation or the phenomena that provide evidence for the claims that the analyst makes. Thus, the research process in which the analyst is engaged is the investigation of texts. Usually, this involves the putting together of a corpus of text from which the data are to be selected.
Context
I hope that I have already more than hinted at the fact that text does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in - indeed it is part of - a context. The notion of context is central to the study of discourse. People sometimes complain that some utterance attributed to them (by the Press, for example, or in a court of law) was misinterpreted because it was 'taken out of context'. By this they may mean one (or a combination of) two things: (a) that the rest of what they said has been ignored or (b) that the circumstances in which the utterance was made and all the paraphernalia of presuppositions, etc., have been ignored. In either case, the complainant is appealing to the indisputable view that the sense of an utterance is not inherent in the words and grammar alone but is crucially affected by contextual factors. Context in the first sense we can call co-text; the second can be labelled context of situation. A major aspect of context of situation is sometimes labelled context of culture. Some people treat this as separate from the context of situation, but it seems to make more sense to see it as an integral part of it.
o CO-TEXT
At the micro-level, a stretch of language under consideration can be seen to fit into the context of its surrounding text. The surrounding text is the co-text. The sense of a chunk of language - a few words or a paragraph - is in part dependent on words and paragraphs around it; these constitute the co-text of the bit in focus. The co-text of this Unit is made up of the other Units comprising this module. Some of the meaning of this Unit is inherent in its positioning as part of the module as a whole, on the fact that is the first of a series of such units, that they resemble it in format, and so on.
o CONTEXT OF SITUATION
The context of situation is made up of all the phenomena which affect the discourse. In face-to-face interaction, the context of situation includes the immediate and wider environment in which the text actually occurs such as the classroom in the case of a teaching discourse, the shop or market in a sales transaction, the workshop in the case of a discussion about a gearbox replacement.
It may be that the physical setting of the discourse is not germane to the nature of the text itself. If you discuss gearbox replacement while on top of a mountain, the precise fact of the altitude may have little bearing on the discourse (on the other hand, it might), but the fact that there is no engine present is likely to be very significant. In addition to the physical location, there is the location in time of the event: time in history, time of the year, time of day may play a determining role.
The interactants also play a part in the context of situation. The people who are discussing gearbox replacement, their ages, nationalities, gender and especially their social roles on this occasion (for example, mechanic and car-owner; apprentice mechanic and skilled mechanic; teacher and student; two non-expert car-owners; friends or strangers) may all be significant.
Every immediate situation is located in a cultural context. The context of culture is an intricate complex of various social phenomena involving historical and geographical setting but also more general aspects like the field of the activity: education, medicine, provision of goods and services in exchange for money. Car maintenance discourse in a highly hierarchical society may be different from that which takes place in a relatively egalitarian society (if there is such a thing). Classroom discourse takes place within a wider cultural context of, say, university education or secondary school education, or slightly more specifically African university education, or Kenyan University education. The discipline in question also plays a part in the context of culture: thus a physics lecture takes place within the cultural practices and traditions of the field of physics at large as well as in a particular education system or institution.
Much of the credit for the emphasis on the role of context in language can be attributed to two significant figures in the history of linguistics: Firth and Malinowski. Rather than repeat facts which I have written up elsewhere, I will ask you to carry out the following reading task. You can find out the answers to the questions about Firth and Malinowski by reading the relevant section in Bloor and Bloor 1995.
Schema theory
One attempt to present a model of background knowledge background knowledge is schema theory. The singular term is schema; the plural is schemata. (If you did not know it already, try to memorise that simple fact and make your verbs and pronouns agree when you use the terms. The reason for the funny plural is that the term is Greek and not yet fully assimilated into English although it is also possible to use the plural schemas).
When you tune in correctly to the conversation about Al Pacino, outlined above, you could be said to activate a film actor schema: a mental construct into which you can attempt to fit aspects of the present conversation. This entails knowing the things about film actors mentioned above, and many more. Everyone's knowledge will differ, at least in the details, but with enough common ground communication is possible.
If you know about Al already, you might even be said at a very local level to activate an Al Pacino schema. This would probably include such elements as: male, small, dark, animated, American, Italian ancestry, starred in The Godfather films; it might also include more esoteric facts such as New Yorker, Shakespeare enthusiast, appeared in Dog Day Afternoon, Revolution, Looking for Richard, Scent of a Woman, Donny Brasco, and so on. It might include evaluative elements: talented actor/genius/ham; handsome/sexy/ugly/; short; thin; etc. Any or all of these could be presupposed in the course of a conversation. As you can see, I have a fairly detailed schema for Al Pacino, and so I could join in easily. But even with only the film actor schema activated, you could probably make sense of most of the conversation, and not lose your credibility as a conversationalist on this occasion.
What I have just said seems to suggest that each person has a different schema in his or her mind, and this seems very plausible. But there must be enough similarity - enough information common to everyone's schemata - to enable us to communicate. Obviously, if your schema and mine were different in every respect, effective communication on the topic would be impossible; we would simply misunderstand each other.
What we are talking about here is what Carrell (1988: 101) describes as: 'the role of pre-existing knowledge structures in providing information left implicit in text.'
But it is not just one schema that needs to be activated for any situation. The background knowledge presupposed in almost any text - written or spoken - is enormous. Let's take a real bit of text from the journal English Language Teaching. Some contextual (co-text) detail: it appears on a new page under the title Action and condition in the post-elementary classroom in bold font larger than that of the main text and also under the name Sherrill Howard Pochieca in a font larger than the main text but less bold than the title. (By referring to this as a title, I am already making explicit a schema relating to the format of certain kinds of text.)
The stretch of text cited here is an extract from a longer stretch printed in italics. This occurs before a much longer non-italicised stretch that goes on for nearly six pages.