Text-a stretch of verbal language of some considerable extent complete in itself, which forms a meaningful whole and serves to transmit information.
A text is something made of language (verbal language) which serves to transmit information. Language being the most important means of human communication, people uses it to inform others of many things that are, or seem, important.
Information transmitted in a verbal message may be of two kinds. The Information of the first type renders the cognitive experiental logical data and does not depend upon the conditions and participants of the communication act. The second type of information concerns the speaker's or writer's attitude to the subject matter and his listener or reader, it renders the role he adopts or assumes in the communication process, i.e. that of questioning, informing, evaluating, expressing emotion, persuading, appealing,-identifying the social standing of the speaker, etc. or in other words serving to establish some human relations.
Messages in language are used to influence other people's behaviour and feelings, to instruct, to amuse and bring about other desired ends.
Information is transmitted from a source to an addressee as a message. A text is a specific form of message serving not only to transmit information but also to store it.
In linguistics the notion of text is restricted to coherent verbal messages in any of the three or four thousand human languages.
It has been argued that a whole text is the primary unit of speech and the primary unit of stylistics description. It may be regarded as one sign, one unit. It is neither a string of sentences nor a set of stylistic devices. The analysis of the meaning and structure of lower ranking units is of course necessary but it should be considered in relation to the whole text and to its other components (i.r. syntagmaticaiiy), and not oniy discussed, as it is usually done, in relation to similar elements in other texts as a matter of choice (paradigmatically).
We shall treat a text as a system of relationships linguistically manifested, аза whole where everything is determined by juxtapositions, equivalence, Similarities and contrasts.
A text is a basic speech unit, manifesting itself in verbal utterances The main characteristic features of a text are functional: it serves for transmitting and storing information between members of human society. The message manifested linguistically, can be stored, and possesses the structural feature of cohesion.
Coherence and cohesion have been 2 very prominent terms in Discourse Analysis and Text Linguistics, but they are difficult to distinguish. They are related etymologically, and share the same verb (cohere).
Coherence (логичность) is logical consistency – unity and structural composition. It may depend on various factors of syntagmatic arrangement, such as repeated occurrence of equivalent elements either distant or juxtaposed. It may depend on a special choice and arrangement of semantically related words and the resulting repetition of some scenes, particular those referring to the important themes of the message.
Cohesion (единство, связность) refers to the means (phonological, grammatical, lexical, semantic) of linking sentences into larger units (paragraphs, chapters) of making them «stick together». Thanks to this property of cohesion, a text is a structure blended into one piece by the integration of its parts which cannot be what they are if taken separately. A text is an integrated structure.
