Understanding Text: Definition, Properties, and Global Spanish

Understanding the Concept of Text

The text is a sentence or a more or less long sequence of sentences ordered coherently and endowed with meaning. It is the maximum unit of communication.

A text elaborates on an idea or a number of ideas that the sender wants to transmit, and each idea is logically related to the others. The resources for this are links, syntactic matches, and semantic relationships.

Therefore, the two essential properties of a text are syntactic cohesion and semantic coherence. Cohesion can be defined as the interdependence between the elements of a text. It exists when each constituent of the text depends on others and cannot be understood without taking these into account.

Cohesion mechanisms are varied; the most important are:

• Sentence connectors
• Discourse operators
• Lexical recurrences
• Anaphoric and cataphoric relations

The Global Presence of the Spanish Language

The Spanish language is one of the most widespread languages on Earth, with approximately 350 million speakers. This number is exceeded only by English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani. Its time of greatest expansion took place during the 16th and 17th centuries, especially after the discovery of America, where most of its speakers are still located.

Specifically, Spanish is spoken in almost all of South America, with the exception of Brazil. It is also the spoken language in Central America and Mexico, apart from some southern states of the United States, mainly in California, especially in urban areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Other cities like New York and Miami have very broad communities of people who speak Spanish. In summary, Spanish is the official language in over 20 countries in America.

The Spanish presence in the rest of the globe is somewhat lower than in America but equally prominent. In Asia, it was spoken in the Philippines, but it is currently experiencing a decline. In Africa, as well as being spoken in state-owned cities (Ceuta and Melilla), it is spoken in northern Morocco and Western Sahara, apart from some communities of Sephardic Jews who, since their expulsion in 1492, have continued to speak Spanish to this day in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Arguably, Spanish is, alongside English and French, the most used language in the world, as evidenced by the fact that it is, after English, the most studied non-native language worldwide.

All of this diversity results in a wide and rich range of phonetic and lexical nuances. To monitor the correction and give the Spanish language unity, there are important institutions such as the Royal Spanish Academy, the Association of Spanish Language Academies, and the Instituto Cervantes.