Miguel Angel Martinez-Cabeza 2003: The Study of Language beyond the Sentence: From Text Grammar to Discourse Analysis.(Book Review)

Publication: Atlantis, revista de la Asociación Espanola de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

Publication Date: 01-DEC-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN)

Miguel Ángel Martínez-Cabeza 2003: The Study of Language beyond the Sentence: From Text Grammar to Discourse Analysis. 2nd ed. Coleccion Estudios de Lengua Inglesa 6. Granada: Comares. 296 pags.

This book is an introduction to the immense area of linguistics above the sentence level. The target reader is the undergraduate student who approaches textual, discursive and pragmatic issues for the first time. As Marténez Dueñas notes in the Preface, the scope of linguistics has changed enormously in the last forty years, pushing its limits beyond the sentence, and including the areas of text linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. This shift has had an obvious reflection in university syllabuses, and new generations of linguistics students have been faced with incorporating this new frame of knowledge to their previous sentence-based linguistic background. As is normally the case in a relatively new area of study, one of the main difficulties that both teachers and students encounter is that there are still few books in which all the approaches and concepts are covered. This fact is a source of intellectual and linguistic richness, since students are often directed to read primary authors and first-hand knowledge. However, it is also useful to be able to resort to a book that attempts to put everything into perspective. Therefore, it is with great joy that teachers and students of linguistics above and beyond the sentence level welcome a book like Martínez-Cabeza's. The author is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Granada

The idea of the volume, a textbook on The Study of Language beyond the Sentence, is good, though ambitious in its scope. The approach, explicit in the subtitle From Text Grammar to Discourse Analysis, reflects the author's personal ideas on the subject, which show even in the order of the chapters and the organisation of the ideas. The book starts with one of the most difficult points in the area of linguistics above the sentence, which is the definition and scope of the terms text, discourse, text grammar, text linguistics and discourse analysis. Section 1.4 is specially useful for students, since it compiles and compares some of the definitions of text and discourse. The author, following Halliday and Hasan (1976) in considering that "the relationship between sentences and texts is not one of constituency" (19), talks of the text as a unit beyond the sentence, meaning not only above but also outside the sentence. He argues that "it is possible to speak of the grammar of a text by analogy with sentence grammar, but it is only possible to speak of discourse analysis." Martínez-Cabeza opts for a methodological simplification of the linguistic field--or oversimplification, as he says--and talks about two levels, the textual level and the discourse level: "The textual level is based primarily on formal features and tends to remain constant. It is a limited account of language as a whole because it misses the cognitive and behavioural aspects. It is...

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