On defining `text'

Let's think about the following questions:

1. Is a text a piece of writing?
2. Is it essential for writing to be involved?
3. Are there differences between written and spoken texts?
4. What are `inscriptions' and `utterances?
5. Is a text one or both of these, or something more abstract?
6. Can a text be a purely mental entity, in the sense `I have a poem in my head, and I'll write it down when I get a coffee'?

If we agree that texts belong to a category of language, then, whatever the answers to these questions, like the questions themselves they are all formulated in an informal metalanguage. In a metalanguage such as this, we can formulate descriptions, definitions, and explanations, and the metalanguage can be informal or formal. We will start informally.

In order to describe a text exhaustively, a complete linguistic description at all levels of representation is required, that is, a highly structured metalanguage. But which levels are most relevant for the description of utterances and instriptions as text?

To define the notion of `text' is even more difficult. In phrasal syntax, the notions of `sentence' and `word' are often taken to be elementary and immediately accessible to a linguistically untrained native speaker. Words are perhaps the easiest items to identify, and the notion of sentence is not without its difficulties. With larger and smaller units, problems arise - it is not clear that a native speaker `knows' in any explicit sense what a `morpheme' or a `phoneme' might be. Nor is it clear that he `knows' without further training what a `text' or other larger organisational unit of utterance or inscription might be.

It is even less easy to provide an `explanation' of what a text is. We'll work on it.