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Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with texts as communication systems. Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars. The application of text linguistics has, however, evolved from this approach to a point in which text is viewed in much broader terms that go beyond a mere extension of traditional grammar towards an entire text. Text linguistics takes into account the form of a text, but also its setting, i.e. the way in which it is situated in an interactional, communicative context. Both the author of a (written or spoken) text as well as its addressee are taken into consideration in their respective (social and/or institutional) roles in the specific communicative context. In general it is an application of discourse analysis at the much broader level of text, rather than just a sentence or word.

Reasons for Text Linguistics
Much attention has been given to the sentence as a self-contained unit, and not enough has been given to studying how sentences may be used in connected stretches of language. It is essentially the presentation of language as sets of sentences.

Text is extremely significant in communication because people communicate not by means of individual words or fragments of sentences in languages, but by means of texts. It is also the basis of various disciplines such as law, religion, medicine, science, politics, et cetera.

Definitions
A text is an extended structure of syntactic units [i.e. text as super-sentence] such as words, groups, and clauses and textual units that is marked by both coherence among the elements and completion…. [Whereas] A non-text consists of random sequences of linguistic units such as sentences, paragraphs, or sections in any temporal and/or spatial extension. (Werlich, 1976: 23)

A naturally occurring manifestation of language, i.e. as a communicative language event in a context. The SURFACE TEXT is the set of expressions actually used; these expressions make some knowledge EXPLICIT, while other knowledge remains IMPLICIT, though still applied during processing. (Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981: 63)

[A term] used in linguistics to refer to any passage- spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole [….] A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence; and it is not defined by its size [….] A text is best regarded as a SEMANTIC unit; a unit not of form but of meaning. (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 1-2)

A text is made up of sentences, but there exist separate principles of text-construction, beyond the rules for making sentences. (Fowler, 1991: 59)

[Text is] a set of mutually relevant communicative functions, structured in such a way as to achieve an overall rhetorical purpose. (Hatim and Mason, 1990)

Text linguists generally agree that text is the natural domain of language, but they still differ in their perspectives of what constitutes a text. This variance is mainly due to the different methods of observations of different linguists, and as such, the definition of text is not yet concrete.

Significance of Contexts
There is a text and there is other text that accompanies it: text that is ‘with’, namely the con-text. This notion of what is ‘with the text’, however, goes beyond what is said and written: it includes other non-verbal signs-on-the total environment in which a text unfolds. (Halliday and Hasan, 1985: 5)

According to Halliday, text is a sign representation of a socio-cultural event embedded in a context of situation. Context of situation is the semio-socio-cultural environment in which the text unfolds. Text and context are so intimately related that neither concept can be comprehended in the absence of the other.

Text Types
Most linguists agree on the classification into five text-types: narrative, descriptive, argumentative, instructive, and comparison/contrast. Some classifications divide the types of texts according to their function. Others differ because they take into consideration the topic of the texts, the producer and the addressee, or the style. Adam and Petitjean, (1989) proposed analyzing of overlaps of different text types with text sequences. Virtanen (1992) establishes a double classification (discourse type and text type) to be used when the Identification text-text type is not straightforward.

Learning languages
Text Linguistics stimulates reading by arousing interest in texts or novels. Increases background knowledge on literature and on different kinds of publications. Writing skills can be improved by familiarizing and duplicating specific text structures and the use of specialized vocabulary.

Analyze the structure of Hebrews
Textual transmission, comparative philology, diachronic and dialectal variation, and the impact this has on the relationship between reader, author and text were considered to analyse Hebrews. Recent methods such as lexical semantics and text-linguistics are also employed to analyse the structure of Hebrews.