Understanding Textuality and Discourse Analysis

Felicity Conditions in Communication

Let's analyze some examples:

• "Hi Joe, how are you?" - S wants to know A. H knows A.
• "Can you open the window?" - S wants H to do A. H is capable of doing A. S believes that H is willing to do A.
• "Mom, I am home." - S wants H to know A. H wants to know A.

Discourse and Language in Context

Discourse is language in context. It is given in a social context and involves interaction. Key factors include:

• Channel (S, W)
• Agent (mono, di, multi)
• Register (Formal, informal)
• Social context
• Purpose (transactional, interactional)
• Context (embedded, reduced)
• Genre (instructive, narrative, descriptive, persuasive, informative, expository)

Text form is the representation of text types.

Communicative Competences (M&S)

• Grammatical: Lexical resources, structural knowledge.
• Sociolinguistic: Social-cultural context, verbal and non-verbal elements.
• Discourse: Sequencing structures to achieve a specific message.
• Strategic: Activates knowledge of other competences.

Communicative Competences (B)

• Organizational: Grammatical, pragmatical (illocutionary competence).

Standards of Textuality

Textuality defines what makes a text a text and not mere words.

1. Situationality

The ideal setting and audience for the discourse to be relevant.

• Settings: Physical, interactional (when, where, who).
• Language: Co-text, reflexive use of language, linguistically related.
• Behavioral environment (non-verbal).
• Extra-situational (socio-political context).

2. Intentionality

Speaker's intention, measurable through illocutionary acts (speech acts - the function implied in speech) and perlocutionary acts (the expected audience response). For example, "It's raining outside" implies "I want you to take cover."

3. Intertextuality

The relationship between texts (references), including lexical items.

4. Informativity

Information given in the text affects the reader beneficially. Connects new and old information. Fronting devices (OSV, ASVO) include theme and pseudo-cleft (e.g., "It is *," "What S # is O").

• Theme: Main idea, topic.
• Rheme: Comment.
• Constant +1: Common theme shared by rhemes, cohesive ties replace the subject.
• Linear: The rheme becomes the theme of the next element.
• Split Rheme (T - r1, r2): r1 -> t+r, r2 -> t+r.
• Derived Theme: As seen in essays.

5. Acceptability

The text reaches the intended audience.

6. Lexical Cohesion

• Parallelism: Parallel structures at the same syntactic and semantic level (e.g., "The most beautiful girl and the most beautiful man").
• Collocation: Words belonging to the same semantic field (e.g., "north, south," "hair, comb," "reader, writer").
• Reiteration: Restating or reasserting meaning using lexical relations.
• Repetition: Repeating the same idea.
• Hypernym, Hyponym, General Noun: Similar to hypernyms.
• Partial Recurrence: Changing the word class of a previously used expression.

Ellipsis

Omission of elements when the information is clear, avoiding redundancy.

• Nominal: Omit a noun head.
• Verbal: Echoing (repeating an element from the verb group, e.g., "Will you do it?" "Yes, I will.") or contrasting auxiliaries (e.g., "Will you make it?" "Yes, I do.").

6b. Grammatical Cohesion

• Reference: Endophoric and exophoric (outside the text) replacement of words and expressions with pronouns. Cataphoric: referring forward. Anaphoric: referring back. Exophoric reference includes personal, demonstrative ("this," "that," "those"), and comparative.
• Ellipsis: Omission of nominal, verbal (echoing, auxiliary contrasting), or clausal elements.
• Substitution: Nominal -> "one," "some"; Verbal -> "do"; Clausal -> "so," "not".
• Conjunction: Relation between segments: additive, adversative, causal, temporal.

7. Coherence

Reflected in the use of words and utterances, providing causal reasons, purpose, time, enablement (general to specific), conflict resolution, and sequence of events.