Text Structure: A Window into Discourse, Context and Mind

by Nelly Tincheva

As even the briefest Bibliographical inquiry will show, text structure is one of those ‘things’ that are generally seen as so well-known and common that almost everyone takes them for granted and, practically, no-one writes about them anymore. Personal experience, however, will frequently reveal that ‘things’ of which knowledge is taken for granted are precisely the ‘things’ people have the faintest grasp of: love, life, time, soul, etc.Within the realm of linguistics, such generally-undefined ‘easily-definables’ would be text, discourse and even language. Text structure certainly tends to be included in the list of ‘common things’ which ‘need no defining’. That absence of need, however, is, if nothing more, at least contestable.

This book addresses the question of what text structure is. The main argument advanced is that text structure should be viewed as the result of conceptual integration processes, i.e. it should be interpreted as a blend.

The book also systematizes existing theories of text, discourse, context and text structure and provides an angle on themas similarly resulting from conceptual integration.

Genres: Linguistics, Writing, Education

232 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2015