The Seven Standards of Textuality in Linguistics

Cohesion

The function of syntax. The surface text in active storage.

Closely-Knit Patterns

  • Phrase, clause, and sentence
  • Augmented transition networks
  • Grammatical dependencies
  • Rules as procedures
  • Micro-states and macro-states
  • Hold stack

Re-using Patterns

  • Recurrence
  • Partial recurrence
  • Parallelism
  • Paraphrase

Compacting Patterns

  • Pro-forms
  • Anaphora and cataphora
  • Ellipsis
  • Trade-off between compactness and clarity

Signaling Relations

  • Tense and aspect
  • Updating
  • Junction: conjunction, disjunction, contrajunction, and subordination
  • Modality

Other Factors

  • Functional sentence perspective
  • Intonation

Coherence

Meaning versus sense. Non-determinacy, ambiguity, and polyvalence. Continuity of senses. Textual worlds.

Concepts and Processing

  • Concepts and relations
  • Strength of linkage: determinate, typical, and accidental knowledge
  • Decomposition
  • Procedural semantics
  • Activation, chunks, global patterns, and spreading activation
  • Episodic and semantic memory
  • Economy
  • Inferencing
  • The world-knowledge correlate
  • Reference

Models and Frameworks

  • Frames, schemas, plans, and scripts
  • Inheritance
  • Primary and secondary concepts
  • Operators
  • Building a text-world model

Intentionality

  • Reduced cohesion
  • Reduced coherence
  • The notion of intention across the disciplines
  • Speech act theory
  • Performatives
  • Grice’s conversational maxims: cooperation, quantity, quality, relation, and manner
  • The notions of action and discourse action
  • Plans and goals
  • Scripts
  • Interactive planning
  • Monitoring and mediation

Acceptability

  • Judging sentences
  • Relationships between acceptability and grammaticality
  • Acceptance of plans and goals

Informativity

Attention. Information theory. The Markov chain. Statistical versus contextual probability.

Levels and Processing

  • Three orders of informativity
  • Triviality, defaults, and preferences
  • Upgrading and downgrading
  • Discontinuities and discrepancies
  • Motivation search
  • Directionality
  • Strength of linkage
  • Removal and restoration of stability
  • Negation
  • Definiteness

Classifying Expectations

  • The real world
  • Facts and beliefs
  • Normal ordering strategies
  • The organization of language
  • Surface formatting
  • Text types
  • Immediate context

Advanced Concepts

  • A newspaper article and a sonnet
  • Expectations on multiple levels
  • Motivations of non-expectedness

Situationality

Situation models. Mediation and evidence.

Core Concepts

  • Monitoring versus managing
  • Dominances
  • Noticing
  • Normal ordering strategies
  • Frequency
  • Salience
  • Negotiation
  • Exophora

Planning and Management

  • Managing
  • Plans and scripts
  • Planboxes and planbox escalation
  • A trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness
  • Strategies for monitoring and managing a situation

Intertextuality

Text types versus linguistic typology.

Functional Definitions of Text Types

  • Descriptive, narrative, and argumentative texts
  • Literary and poetic texts
  • Scientific and didactic texts

Discourse and Conversation

  • Using and referring to well-known texts
  • The organization of conversation
  • Problems and variables
  • Monitoring and managing
  • Reichman’s coherence relations
  • Discourse-world models

Recalling Textual Content

  • Effects of the schema
  • Trace abstraction, construction, and reconstruction
  • Inferencing and spreading activation
  • Mental imagery and scenes
  • Interactions between text-presented knowledge and stored world-knowledge
  • Textuality in recall experiments