The Development of Textual Linguistics and Its Supporting Theories

E. M. Forster once wrote, "How do I know what I think til I see what I say?" It is essentially this question that has puzzled linguists for decades. The relationship between language, thought, and writing has remained elusive largely because there is no set qualitative value for judging writing systems, just as there is no one pure race, or one pure language. For this reason, interest in textual linguists was nearly abandoned in the late fifties because the only standards for judging the constructs of a writing system were the competency and individual performances of varying writers, which could yield no conclusive theories (Jordan, 29). However, there has since been a renewed interest in the topic on the bases that language can best be understood by analyzing actual instances within a context rather than made-up instances. This realization has come about though largely in the past decade through the efforts of textual linguists who have sought to prove the distinctions of the written language as worthy of study in relationship to spoken language.

It should first be noted that the move from what rules govern language to how our brain interprets these rules in thought and writing is an inherently complex task that has required assistance from psycholinguists as well textual linguists. Together, these fields of study have sought to analyze the topic in the descriptive tradition, which seeks to identify and describe the structures of written communication without the use of intuitive judgments (Jordan, 30). However, the field of linguistics has grown to accept the study of a text as it exists, and not as it should exist, after more than a century of growing pains that fought to delay the final spurt it has recently received.