ABSTRACT
A crucial moment in the history of linguistics was the development of text linguistics towards the end of the twentieth century. Theoretical linguistics had been preoccupied with the analysis of the clause and sentence, leaving broader contextual and social matters of language to discourse analysts, rhetoricians, sociolinguists, stylisticians, and literary critics. Text linguistics focuses on the analysis of text , which is more than the simple accumulation of sentences: the property of a text lies in factors such as its acceptability, its situation (see Chapter 2), its cohesion, its apparent intentionality (see Chapter 11), its intertextuality (see Chapter 9), and its informativity (see Chapter 7). Where texts are the objects produced by people combining these factors, textuality is the property of text in our shared cognitive mechanics: textuality is our sense of a text. The experienced quality of textuality is texture – this is an essentially cognitive poetic concept.
