Textual Properties: Suitability, Coherence & Cohesion

• Text is a communicative unit with three constitutive properties: suitability, coherence, and cohesion.

Textual Properties

• Suitability adapts the text to the communicative situation.
• Coherence ensures the text is a global sense unit where all elements relate.
• Cohesion relates elements through grammatical or lexical procedures.
• The text must have linguistic correctness, both orthographic and grammatical.
• Written text must have characteristics affecting its external appearance.
• Textual properties allow a text to fit correctly into a communicative situation and ensures it has global sense and logical interrelated parts.
• A text lacking textual properties will not communicate an idea successfully.

Adequacy

• Adequacy adapts text to a communicative situation by choosing a type of record and is conditioned by the relationship between the sender, receiver, purpose, the theme, and channel used.
• The speaker determines the record by the production context.
• Language adapts to the communicative situation through categories.
• Field determines the specificity of a text as specialized, technical, or general, referencing the social framework and intentionality.
• Mode is the communication channel (oral, written, audiovisual, dialog, or monologue), determining the degree of spontaneity and planning.
• Tenor relates to the relationship between sender and receiver and the text's purpose and can be formal, informal, colloquial, or neutral.

Coherence

• Coherence is the textual property allowing a text to be perceived as a structured whole, with related parts of global meaning.
• Coherent text presents organized ideas, attending to the most relevant and logically connecting concepts.
• A coherent text needs its parts (words, sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters) related to each other and the global theme.

Cohesion

• Cohesion is a property of texts relating elements by making a network of meaning, making coherence visible and can be grammatical or lexical.

Lexical Cohesion

• Words link through the relationships between their meanings.
• Resources that enable these relationships are substitution, repetition, and the semantic field.
• Substitution avoids repeating a term in the text by using synonyms and general words.
• Synonyms link two words with the same or similar meanings.
• Generalizing words have a broad reference and can be used to encompass different elements and must be used carefully in excess, the text can become ambiguous.
• Repetition emphasizes the importance of a word or idea.
• Semantic Field relates words having common or similar meaning traits.

Grammatical Cohesion

• Textual elements relate through grammatical elements such as ellipsis, deixis, connectors, and conjunctions.

Elipsis

• Ellipsis removes words to avoid duplication.

Deixis

• Deixis points out present elements among speakers or in the statement and can be personal, of place, or of time and is anaphoric temporal.
• Anaphora occurs when the reader must go back in the text to interpret the meaning of the word.
• Cataphora occurs when the reader must continue reading to know what word the pronoun or determinant refers to.

Connectors and Conjunctions

• Connectors and conjunctions make the relationship between two or more words explicit, classified by relationship type.
• Additive connectors: also, above, likewise.
• Adversative connectors: but, however, nevertheless
• Concessive connectors: even so, in any case.
• Consecutive and Causal connectors: therefore, then, because of.
• Comparative connectors: similarly, equally, alike.
• Reformulation connectors: that is, namely, in other words.
• Ordering connectors: first, then, finally.
• Coordinating conjunctions can be copulative, disjunctive, or adversative.
• Subordinating conjunctions can be conditional, causal, temporal, among others.