Structures in discourse

Abstract

Texts are expected to have structure and the study of that structure is a central concern in text and discourse linguistics. Texts are semantic units and their structure is therefore a matter of organization of the content material included in them. At the same time, text structure is also a matter of form, since texts manifest linguistic signals of various kinds whose purpose is to facilitate the text receiver’s task of interpretation, i.e. the task of building a text world around a given text. And even shape can be used to disclose the structure of a given text. (Virtanen 1997a)