Sentence connexion and global text structures: a case study of a political text, English leader article

Abstract

The paper first gives a brief overview of the history and theoretical status of discourse analysis, or "text linguistics." The main body of the paper consists of a detailed analysis of sentence connexion, i.e. the logical relationship between sentences and larger chunks of text, performed on a newspaper leader article. The results of this local analysis are then related to the global organisation of text structure with components such as macro- and super-structure by way of interpreting them in terms of the psycholinguistics of global text comprehension. The analysis is supplemented by considerations of functional sentence perspective, topic management, and a characterisation of the macro-speech act as primarily subjective with the appropriate surface manifestations.