Longman Dictionary of

PE2379 ch07.qxd 24/1/02 16:08 Page 550
text linguistics
text linguistics n
a branch of linguistics which studies spoken or written TEXTs, e.g. a
descriptive passage, a scene in a play, a conversation. It is concerned, for
instance, with the way the parts of a text are organized and related to one
another in order to form a meaningful whole. Some linguists prefer to
include the study of all spoken texts, particularly if they are longer than
one sentence, under DISCOURSE ANALYSIS.
text processing n
theories of how readers comprehend texts and the sequence of operations
they make use of to do so.
see INTERACTIVE PROCESSING, TOP-DOWN PROCESSING.
text structure n
the organizational pattern of ideas and information found in a text.
Different types of texts (e.g. paragraphs, essays, letters, reports) are
identified by the way information is sequenced and organized and this
structure creates the text’s COHERENCE.
For example common patterns of paragraph structure are comparisoncontrast,
cause-effect, and problem-solution.
textbook n
a book on a specific subject used as a teaching learning guide, especially
in a school or college. Textbooks for foreign language learning are often
part of a graded series covering multiple skills (listening, reading, writing,
speaking, grammar) or deal with a single skill (e.g. reading).
textual function n
see FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE 2
TG n
another term for TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR see GENERA-
TIVE GRAMMAR
that-trace effect n
in English, a subject cannot be extracted when it follows the complementizer
that. Thus, while the sentences Did you think that Jennifer
would win? and Who did you think would win? are both grammatical,
the sentence *Who did you think that would win? is ungrammatical.
This is called a that-trace effect. It does not apply in all
languages.
see also TRACE
550