Trust and text, text as trust

• Autores: Michael Toolan
• Localización: International journal of corpus linguistics, ISSN-e 1569-9811, ISSN 1384-6655, Vol. 12, Nº 2, 2007, págs. 269-288
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this essay I celebrate and interrogate John Sinclair's seminal paper, "Trust the text", a paper in which several radically new ideas about the role of prospection and encapsulation in the reader's processing of text are outlined. I mention some of the ways in which trust is fundamental to matters of language and cooperative communication, but also try to enlarge on what I think Sinclair has in mind. In reading on (and not re-reading), as we nearly always do when confronted with text, we are trusting the text in a more particular way, trusting it to have been composed in such a way that what follows will answer or complete what has gone before. This text-trust is perhaps the most fundamental structuring principle in written discourse, and mostly we apply it unwittingly; Sinclair's paper broaches some lines of enquiry by which linguists might develop a fuller explanation of it.