Text and Text Analysis

Abstract

This article focuses on ‘text,’ which is defined here as a monological stretch of written discourse that shows coherence. The basic characteristics of ‘texthood’ – that is, the referential and relational coherence of its constituent parts – are discussed. Then, ‘text analysis’ is defined as the systematic dissection of a textual unity in its constituent parts and the study of those parts in relation to each other. The instrument of text analysis can be used with various research goals – whether understanding the linguistic, cognitive, computational, or evaluative nature of a text. We provide an overview of several leading linguistic methods of text analysis. Text analyses of natural language texts have a crucial role to play in text linguistics and discourse studies, because the development of theoretical models of discourse phenomena needs to proceed in interaction with the study of the (sometimes very complex) reality of natural language in use. Finally, we discuss issues for further research, pointing toward innovative text analytic research: that of corpora of natural texts, but also of multimodal documents.