A text-based analysis of non-narrative texts

Most linguistic theories are concerned with the rendering explicit of what ordinary speakers find intuitively acceptable. Specifically, a linguistic theory is to provide rules for sentence well-formedness. A step forward is taken by recent researchers into text well-formedness. The conditions for text well-formedness can be viewed as requirements on either the surface structure or the semantic organization of the text. This study is a research into the constraints on the semantic structure of the text. In this study text well-formedness is defined in terms of the Relevance Requirement. On this view, a text is well-formed if all its main assertion propositions are relevant to a Topic of Discourse (DT). Thus, Relevance is viewed as a relation between a proposition or a set of propositions and a DT. To be able to account for text well-formedness, then, it is necessary to make explicit the notions of Relevance and DT. My suggestion here is to explicate the above notions in cognitive terms. Specifically, I propose here the application of categorical organization (in the sense established by Rosch) to non-narrative texts. Such texts, I argue, get organized in the way categorial concepts are formed.