The Text Linguist

Although my education and teaching area was primarily British literature, I taught the introductory linguistics course in college and have read books and articles on the subject of text linguistics. Unfortunately, I see less on the subject than was the case 20 years ago. In this blog, I hope to explain and promote my theory of the structure of text based mainly on Kenneth Burke's The Rhetoric of Religion. I welcome commentary on my theory and other theories on the nature of text.

Friday, June 17, 2011

What happened to the flurry of interest in the subject of text linguistics? This appears to have been a fashion in ideas. My own superficial guess is that since the linguists were trying to view text as a "sentence writ large" they ran into a stone wall. Sentence is declarative; text is persuasive or change-driven.