Text Classification: Purpose, Language, and Codes

Texts and Communicative Purpose

Texts can be classified according to three criteria: diction, message content, or communicative purpose. An expository text, for example, can encompass humanities and journalism simultaneously.

Classifying Texts by Purpose

• Informative: Transmit events, general information, data, or knowledge.
• Prescriptive: Direct, order, advise, instruct, or prescribe.
• Persuasive: Convincing, persuading, i.e., modifying receiver behavior.
• Rhetorical: Have an aesthetic purpose, capturing the receptor's attention through beauty, etc.

Language Features and Text Codes

To achieve the communicative purpose, messages included in the text must adapt to their communicative intent.

Text Types by Language Function

Texts, depending on the predominant function of language, can be:

• Representative: Only communicate objective facts.
• Expressive: Convey what happens to the issuer, what they feel or want.
• Conative: Purporting to act on the receptor to cause a reaction.
• Phatic: Used to maintain communication between sender and receiver.
• Poetic: Used with an aesthetic intention.

Verbal and Nonverbal Codes

Texts can be characterized by code. The verbal code is based on words; the nonverbal is based on images, gestures, etc. Journalistic texts combine verbal and iconic language resources. Advertising texts rely on the connotative effect based on the suggestion of nonverbal codes. The influence nonverbal codes can exert on messages with verbal signs is very important because they add connotations.

Instructional Texts

In everyday life, we are faced with texts whose primary purpose is to give us instructions. Instructions are commonly used in exposition and description as forms of discourse.

Features of Instructional Texts

• Division of instructions into short, tidy paragraphs.
• Use of the imperative (sometimes the second person).
• Denotative and accurate vocabulary, due to its utilitarian nature. Technical terms may appear depending on the content. Abbreviations and foreign terms are also frequently used.
• Simple syntax, with simple and orderly structures.
• Exhaustive and detailed description of actions to be carried out.
• Support from iconic codes (images, diagrams) to help follow instructions properly.