Key Linguistic Features for Text Quality

Adequacy

There are two main approaches to adequacy:

• Rule-Based Adequacy: Meeting the requirements of standard language regarding spelling, lexicon, and morphosyntax.
• Communicative Adequacy: Using linguistic elements appropriately to achieve the speaker's goal or intent. This involves adapting the form of speech to several communicative elements:
  • Audience type (ideology, culture, size, homogeneity).
  • Topic treatment (specialized or general).
  • Topic nature (serious, transcendent, etc.).
  • Field (academic, scientific, journalistic, etc.).
  • Channel (oral or written).
  • Lexical register (formal, specific, standard, colloquial, vulgar).
  • Use of resources.
  • Elements of impersonality and universality, sentence patterns, language functions.
  • Point of view, formulas, or focus/topicalization elements (orality, rhetorical figures like irony, euphemisms, dysphemisms).
  • Viewpoint (objective or subjective), predominant sentence patterns, paraphrases.

Consistency

Consistency refers to the content level, its internal unity, and the logical development of the presentation. Consistency is determined by the following factors:

• Thematic unity throughout the text.
• Scope or context, as previously described.
• Assumptions: What the speaker implies but does not explicitly state, as it can be easily inferred.

Note the use of involved and factitive verbs.

Deixis

Factors used to draw deixis:

• Textual Deixis: Refers to elements within the text or speech. Pronouns often repeat or match previous elements. It can be anaphoric (referring to past discourse) or cataphoric (referring to future discourse).
• Personal Deixis: Refers to participants in the discourse or external referents.
• Social Deixis: Refers to social structure (e.g., employers, workers).
• Spatiotemporal Deixis: Refers to elements related to time and place within the text.

Lexical Cohesion

Achieved through repetition or semantic relationships between words:

• Synonyms
• Enumerations
• Antonyms
• Lexical Pro-forms
• Semantic Fields
• Derivational Relations
• Hierarchization