Using <TEXT> in TEI Markup.

Using &lt;TEXT&gt; in TEI Markup.

Paul
Caton

Women Writers Project
Brown University
paul@swansong.stg.brown.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The Text Encoding Initiative's DTD has a liberal content model for the
&lt;TEXT&gt; element (Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard 1994, 1192). Because the DTD
requires &lt;TEXT&gt; at a high level, the relative liberality of the content
model helps the markup scheme apply to a wide range of humanities documents.
However, a data resource is only useful if the data are consistent in type of
form and content. In the case of SGML-encoded texts,
while a validating parser can check the form of the data the encoding project
must enforce consistency in the type of content.
The need for data consistency generates a principle of contextual equivalence,
namely that an element &lt;FOO&gt; should always mark the same kind of content
regardless of where that content occurs.Note that the reverse is not
true: the same piece of content may perform different functions according to
where it occurs and so may merit different tags in different
positions. A related principle is that where two tags may be used for
the same piece of content then a reason exists for using one rather than the
other that has nothing to do with arbitrariness or convenience but comes instead
from the nature or function of the piece of content. These two principles are
fundamental to the logic of descriptive markup and they have particular
relevance to the use of &lt;TEXT&gt;.Tagging a low-level object as a
&lt;TEXT&gt; presupposes that object has a property or quality that makes it
something more than just a paragraph, quote, line of verse, etc. According to
the principle of contextual equivalence, the quality that makes the low-level
object a &lt;TEXT&gt; is the same that makes the high-level object a
&lt;TEXT&gt;. In effect, even though the low-level &lt;TEXT&gt; is optional
while the high-level &lt;TEXT&gt; is obligatory, it is the possibility of a low-level &lt;TEXT&gt; that imposes a principled
condition on what the high-level &lt;TEXT&gt; can be.
The TEI element set is designed to reflect widely-shared textual concepts:
broadly, everyone recognises paragraphs, quotes, dramatic speeches, etc. The
association of &lt;TEXT&gt; with "text" is inescapable (whether the generic
identifier is "TEXT" or "FOO"). While some uses of "a text" or "the text" do
imply nothing more than an arbitrary piece of text (as in, for example, "the
text for my sermon today is ....", or the text for a close-reading exercise),
many other uses imply an identifiable thing: "a text" as a piece of text with a
property or properties not shared by all other pieces of text. That the DTD
specifically allows a low-level use of &lt;TEXT&gt; shows that TEI had this more
specific concept in mind and wanted to accommodate it. The confusion engendered
by this accommodation simply reflects the many different meanings assigned to
"text" in everyday use. A workable description of what constitutes a
text/&lt;TEXT&gt; must account both for the singularity of a text and for its
ability to contain one or more things possessing a similar singularity. The
TEI's Guidelines do not do this, so we must look beyond
them. A promising place to start is the work of the Russian critic and textual
theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, and with one essay in particular, "The Problem of
Speech Genres."
In this essay, written in the early nineteen-fifties but not published in Russian
until 1979 and in English until 1986, Bakhtin distinguishes an utterance from a linguistic unit.
Linguistic units--words, phrases, clauses, and sentences--are the building
blocks of utterances, whilst utterances are the building blocks of
communication. Utterances represent the smallest particles in a physics of
language in use. Devoid of any communicative context, words, phrases, etc., are
simply abstractions: representative examples of the formal properties of the
language. Utterances, on the other hand, have unique properties deriving from
their communicative context. Many times the boundaries of a linguistic unit and
an utterance will coincide, but Bakhtin stresses that "[the] completely new
qualities and peculiarities belong not to the sentence that has become the whole
utterance, but precisely to the utterance itself" (Bakhtin 1986, 74). Utterances
must consist of linguistic units, but linguistic units are not necessarily
utterances.
All utterances have a generic aspect, a form typical to the communicative
context. Bakhtin calls these forms speech genres, and he distinguishes between
primary and secondary speech genres. Secondary genres are more complex than
primary genres because in "the process of their formation, they absorb and
digest various primary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech
communion" (Bakhtin 1986, 62). Simple kinds of utterance become compositional
units of more complex utterances. For example, Bakhtin points to the genre of
the novel which, because it represents human activity contains representations
of various utterance types (letters, rejoinders in dialogue, etc.).
The problem of "a text" versus "a piece of text," which is the problem of
deciding what is a &lt;TEXT&gt; and what just a &lt;DIV&gt; or &lt;QUOTE&gt; or
&lt;LG&gt;, lies in defining the qualitative difference between what may appear
identical pieces of language. Bakhtin's distinction between utterances and
linguistic units speaks directly to that problem, and his notions of utterances
and primary and secondary speech genres offer an encoding project practical and
principled criteria for using &lt;TEXT&gt;. Briefly, these are:
&lt;TEXT&gt; applies only to the thing that is the utterance (eg. only
to the epistolary novel itself, not to the letters that make it
up)
for a piece of writing to count as a &lt;TEXT&gt; there must be as
much of it as is known to exist (with qualifications for different
versions and historical contingency)
when one instance of a secondary genre incorporates one or more other
instances of secondary genres, and those incorporated instances would on
their own qualify as &lt;TEXT&gt;s, then they should be tagged as
&lt;TEXT&gt;s within the incorporating &lt;TEXT&gt;

References

M.
M.
Bakhtin

The problem of speech genres

Speech genres and other late essays

translated from the Russian by

Vern
W.
McGee

and edited by

Caryl
Emerson

Michael
Holquist

Austin, Texas
University of Texas Press
1986

C.
M.
Sperberg-McQueen

Lou
Burnard

Guidelines for electronic text encoding and
interchange

2 vols.
Chicago and Oxford
Text Encoding Initiative
1994