Text grammar

A text grammar is a structural description of a linguistic performance. The whole of the performance, regardless of its length is called a discourse, and when this discourse is recorded in written language, it becomes a linguistic object, or text. Both linguists and psychologists are interested in the descriptions produced by text grammars. For instance, T.A. Van Dijk, a linguist, believes that a text grammar might answer questions about the coherence of texts which are not explained by sentence grammars. He says that a text grammar could formulate the conditions for coherence between sentences in a simpler and more consistent way than sentence grammars, and at the same time describe the larger structures which unify the text (Van Dijk, 1972).

Related Topics:
Linguistic - Discourse - Psychologists - Grammar - T.A. Van Dijk

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Psychologists use text grammars to describe the structure of a discourse for a different purpose; their description of the content is used to represent meaning in the mind of the reader. The meaning which the reader derives from the text can be measured by comparing the semantic description of the text to a description of reader's recall of that text.

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