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organisation of phrases, clauses, and clause complexes (not just sentences). Its ‘semantics’ could be a ‘post-classical epistemology’ that ‘brackets’ knowledge and content by examining them not via ‘reference’, ‘reality’, or ‘truth value’ but via the applied ‘modelling styles’ such as ‘realism’ with ‘parameters of design’ such as complexity, novelty, and determinacy. Its ‘pragmatics’ could be a ‘critical’ view of communication as an ongoing interaction whereby the significance of a situation (real or hypothetical) is being negotiated, speaking turns are assigned, and relations of power or solidarity are enacted. These three domains are organised within a text agenda reflecting the ongoing docket of actions, plans, and goals, and within a text economy of focuses, values, and priorities. The three thus merge in a framework for exploring the relation of texts to such factors as text types, style, register, language for special purposes (LSP) and terminology, but also socialisation, education, translation, ideology, gender, and emotion.
2. Some central issues
The following central issues in text studies have crystallized in the work of numerous researchers:
1.The text is not merely a linguistic unit, but an event of human action, interaction, communication, and cognition. The notion of the text being merely an instance of language has a long tradition both in folk-wisdom and in the various specialised disciplines that have studied texts – from ancient grammar and rhetoric up through modern linguistics. The notion was hardly challenged as long as the ‘text’ did not have the status of a central or explicitly defined term. When language studies reached the point in the search for constraints where the ‘text’ did attain this status, its ‘multi-media’ qualities as a social and interactional event came into focus. The perennial question, ‘Is it still linguistics?’ generated during half a century of self-conscious questing for ‘language by itself’, seems quaint or irrelevant now. The constraints bearing upon texts must be comprehensively explored, whatever their sources.
2.The main source of data is naturally occurring texts and discourses. Through history, most studies of language have expropriated language data without expressly justifying its authenticity. Most samples in earlier studies were in practice taken from prestigious sources such as literary or sacred texts, whose specialised qualities were not considered problematic. Modern linguistics recognised the problems and emphatically turned to ordinary speech but, somewhat contradictorily, proposed to describe it apart from texts. The proposal eventually led to descriptions based on invented data, which was artificial in many respects including even its supposed ‘ordinariness’. Today, large corpuses of real data reveal the arguments in favour of this tactic to be either obsolete, e.g. that we cannot get our hands
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on enough data; or spurious from the start, e.g. that speakers have some idealised ‘competence’ whose relation to what they actually say is deeply uncertain. The corpuses also show that the supposed ‘uniqueness’ of every utterance impels us not to retreat from ‘surface structure’ to ‘deep structure’ but rather to exploit the commonalities of collocation and colligation that we can derive from the data.
3.Text analysis is rich and expansive. The amount of potentially relevant data for describing a text as a communicative event is in principle open. We can be content when we have uncovered some non-obvious and useful insights about the human consequences of the text, e.g. how and how well it makes knowledge accessible to people who need it.
4.In modern-day text research, the investigator has to engage and re-engage with the texts rather than strive for an idealised separation of subject from object or scientist from data.
5.The motives for doing text research in terms of epistemological interests bearing on the relations between texts and society have become more and more important for researchers in the field. Thus, e.g. projects addressing issues of inequality in the access to knowledge through discourse are socially relevant and thus enhanced. ‘Critical’ text research should ultimately try to establish freedom of access to knowledge and to reveal and redistribute communicative power structures.
6.Text linguistics has an interdisciplinary perspective; linguistics cannot be the sole basis for a science of text and discourse. To understand a phenomenon as complex as language, we need to regard it from continually alternating and evolving viewpoints.
These issues have increased in importance within text linguistics. They all go in the direction of Coseriu’s (1971: 189) vision of “a new dimension” wherein “the text is a perspective concerning all of linguistics, and every linguistic discipline would be reconceived from this standpoint”.
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