Text Utility

7/30/2019 Text Utility

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Text and Textuality

Lothar Lemnitzer

[email protected]

Text Technology

Text and Textuality p.1


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Topics

What you will learn

What is a Text?Seven Criteria of Textuality

Cohesion

Coherence



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What you will learn

In this session you will learn

what is special about texts,

what the concept of textuality refers to,

which are the (main) features of textuality,

how these main features become manifest on

the surface of texts.



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Is this a text?



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Seminar fur Sprachwissenschaft

O

rthis

?


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A text is more than a bag of sentences

Consider the following "story":

Bush countered with a detailed account of hissuccesses.

Kerry attacked the foreign policy of the Bushadministration.

He said that he will fight the terrorists until theyare defeated.

Last night the first TV competition of the two

candidates took place.



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A practical approach

"Text" is a prototypical concept (no absoluteborders).

The prototypical text bears at least some of the

features of textuality .

The borderline cases miss some of them (butnever the central ones).

A short story is much more prototypical than e.g.a table.

It is a pragmatic consideration where to draw theborderline.



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Features of Textuality

According to de Beaugrande and Dressler, the

features of textuality are:

Cohesion and Coherence,

Intentionality,

Acceptability,

Informativity,

Situationality,

Intertextuality.



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Cohesion

Cohesiondesignates the "glue" which holds the pro-

positions of a text together.



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Coherence

Coherence designates the relation between a text

and its "textual world". - Aboutness, topic of a text


I i li


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Intentionality

Intentionality designates "the text producers attitude

that the set of occurrences should constitute a co-hesive and coherent text instrumental in fulfilling the

producers intention, e.g. to distribute knowledge"(p.

7).


A t bilit


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Acceptability

Acceptability designates the "the text receivers atti-

tude that the set of occurrences should constitute acohesive and coherent text having some use or re-

levance for the receiver..."(p.7).


I f ti it


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Informativity

Informativity concerns the "extent to which the oc-

currences of the presented text are expected vs. un-expected or known vs. unknown"(p. 8/9).


Sit ti lit


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Situationality

Situationality concerns the "factors which make a

text relevant to a situation of occurrence"(p9). ap-propriateness


Interte t alit


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Intertextuality

Intertextuality concerns the "factors which make the

utilization of one text dependent upon knowledge ofone or previously encountered texts"(p. 10).


C h i


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Cohesion

Cohesiondesignates the "glue" which holds thepropositions of a text together.

Cohesion is established by cohesive devices.

Cohesion is visible on the surface of texts.


C h i


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Cohesion

Cohesive devices

Recurrence

Partial Recurrence

Parallelism

Paraphrase

Pro-forms

Ellipsis

Tense and AspectJunction


Recurrence


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Recurrence

Direct repetition of elements.Bush met media representatives... Bush

explained that ....

Recognition: simple pattern matching


Partial Recurrence


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Partial Recurrence

Using the same basic word-components andshifting them to a different word class.

Bush claimed that ... This claim turned out to be

unwarranted.

Recognition: morphological analysis; lemmatisation

or stemming


Parallelism


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Parallelism

Re-using surface formats but filling them withdifferent expressions.

Mark the text .... Press the DEL key ... Move the

cursor ... Save the changes ...

Recognition: (Partial) syntactic analysis


Paraphrase


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Paraphrase

Recurrence of content with a change of expression(synonymy, plesionymy, morphological variation).

Bush met media representatives...

The President explained that ....

Recognition: use of resources which model seman-

tic relations between expressions


Pro forms


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Pro-forms

Short words empty of their own particular content,which can stand in place of more determinate,content-activating expressions.

Bush met media representatives... They wanted

to know ... He explained that ....

Recognition: anaphora resolution


Ellipsis


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Ellipsis

An apperceptible discontinuity of the surface text.Where is she? - Downstairs. Waiting.

Detection: (Partial) Parsing


Tense and Aspect


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Tense and Aspect

The use of different tenses / aspects andparticularly their change can structure the text.

Yesterday we used our mobile phone to talk to

somebody. Today , we use it to send photos.

Tomorrow , we will need it to not loose orientation.

Detection: Temporal adverbs, verb tenses


Junction


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Junction

Device for signalling a relationship betweenpropositions

conjunctive (and, or),

disjunctives (but),

other junctives (though, consequently ...)


Coherence


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Coherence

Observation: A person who reproduces the contents

of a text will never use the same wording as the text

itself. No two persons performing this task will use

the same wording.


Coherence continued


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Coherence continued

Coherence is a relation between

the textual content,

the textual world and

the mental representation of this textual world bythe reader.


The textual content


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The textual content

The textual content is established by

concepts

which are represented by lexical units

(synonyms, paraphrases, PRO-Forms),lexical-semantic and ontological relationsbetween these concepts and lexical units

(antonymy, part-whole, hyperonymy,class-instance) .


The textual world


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The textual world

The textual world typically consists of

objcects (agents and patients),

actions and states and

states of affairs.


Mental representation of the textual world


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p

Current psycholinguistic models of howpropositions are mentally represented:

Frames

ScriptsSchemata

MentRep[A] > Text > MentRep[B]


Coherence continued


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Coherence is established by the writer andre-constructed by the recipient.

The recipient uses knowledge which is beyondwhat is represented in the text (backgroundknowledge).

Coherence is not completely conveyed with orencoded in the text.


Coherence continued


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Coherence is therefore difficult to re-constructwith the means of natural language processing.

Coherence has, however, to be preserved in textsurrogates (e.g. summaries).

Example: In a summary of a medical report, it does

not suffice to refer to a particular medical treatment

which is mentioned. It is important to state whetherthe author advocates or rejects this treatment.


Text Utility

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