Language; Discourse and Text

Discourse

Originally the word 'discourse' comes from Latin 'discursus' which denoted 'conversation, speech'. According to some linguist, they have illustrated by the following definition: Discourse is a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative" (Crystal 1992:25). On the other hand Dakowska, being aware of differences between kinds of discourses indicates the unity of communicative intentions as a vital element of each of them.
There are seven criteria which have to be fulfilled to qualify either a written or a spoken text as a discourse has been suggested by Beaugrande (1981).

These include:
·    Cohesion - grammatical relationship between parts of a sentence essential for its interpretation;
·    Coherence - the order of statements relates one another by sense.
·    Intentionality - the message has to be conveyed deliberately and consciously;
·    Acceptability - indicates that the communicative product needs to be satisfactory in that the audience approves it;
·    Informativeness - some new information has to be included in the discourse;
·    Situationality - circumstances in which the remark is made are important;
·    Intertextuality - reference to the world outside the text or the interpreters' schemata;

Nowadays, however, not all of the above mentioned criteria are perceived as equally important in discourse studies, therefore some of them are valid only in certain methods of the research (Beaugrande 1981, cited in Renkema 2004:49).

3.2    Text
What is text? The answer that is often given is that a text is a sequence of sentence. This answer is clearly unsatisfactory. Text is two or more utterances that must be cohesion or connectedness one to another.

A long tradition of text linguistics that has persisted in northern Europe made some attempts about the text analysis. First, it began with attempts to account for how sentences are linked together using linguistics resources. Than, Werlich (1976) described of how linguistic features characterize strategies used in different text type (narrative, descriptive, expository and argumentative). Likewise, the prague school and it’s followers, among whom was Michael hallyday, focused on how the construction of individual construction in terms of their theme (their starting point) and rheme (what was being said about the topic) contributed to the larger pattern of information in extended texts (see fries 1983; eiler 1986; francis 1989; firbas 1992)

For example:
Werlich was enormously influential among German EFL teachers.
The explanation from the example above is that the theme (the starting point- usually the grammatical subject) is werlich, and the rheme is what is said about him (that he was enormously influential). We can repeat different number of theme over a number of sentences, and use the rheme of the one sentence in the theme of the next sentence are among the preoccupations of the prague school linguist, and they represent a major strand of functional (as defined in halliday 1997: 16) approaches to text.

    There are approaches in analyses text. First is concerning the cognitive processing of extended writing texts, and second is rethorical structure analysis.

1.    Concerning the cognitive processing of extended writing texts.
       The steps of this approaches are:
o    we need to activate a necessary scheme (or mental presentation)
o    we have to infer (if we do not know it). Since this is not stated explicitly.
o    we need to give the implicit meaning.