We explain what text typologies are and the characteristics of each one. Also, how do they differ from textual genres.
What are text typologies?
A textual typology is a possible categorization of the different texts that exist, that is, one way among many to classify texts based on certain specific features. Therefore, there is no single, unique and universal textual typology, since texts can be classified in many ways, depending on their theme, their length, their orality or writing, their stylistic strategies, etc.
In general, when we talk about texts, we are not only referring to written texts, but to the general productions of verbal language. For example, when we talk to the bus driver we generate a recognizable oral text, the same as when we write a email or compose a poem in our notebook. This is why the linguistics, the discipline that studies verbal language, has been concerned since its inception with building categories to group, recognize and better study the different existing texts.
The most common and popular textual typology of all is currently the one that distinguishes texts based on their communicative function dominant. This is equivalent to saying that it uses the "purpose" of the text as a criterion, that is, what it offers the receiver.
This typology distinguishes between:
- Narration (narrative text). It consists of a set of events strung together chronologically in the manner of a story, a chronicle or a story of any kind.Examples of this type of text are: journalistic chronicles, literary stories and history books.
- Description (descriptive text). It consists of an enumeration or detail of the characteristics of a person, thing or fact, which details what X is like to the receiver (and not what X is). Examples of this type of text are: the file of the works of art in a museum, the spoken portraits that the victims of a robbery give to the police, and the poetry or the songs that describe the moods of the author.
- Argumentation (argumentative text). It consists of a set of reasons that seek to influence the opinion of the receiver with respect to something, or that invite him to undertake a certain behavior, convincing him through arguments. Examples of this type of text are: opinion columns in the newspaper, the political harangues made during the electoral campaign and the monographs holding an academic point of view on a subject.
- Explanation (explanatory text or information text). It consists of a series of data, information and objective details, whose purpose is to provide the reader with some type of knowledge or knowledge, without an open intention to tell him what to believe or how he should think about it. Examples of this type of text are: the articles of a encyclopedia, scientific essays on the nature and fact sheets of foods that detail their contents and components.
- Dialogue (dialogical text). It consists of the recreation of a conversation between two or more people, whether real or imaginary, and which seeks to almost theatrically reproduce the way in which it happened or in any case would happen. Examples of this type of text are: the informal conversations that we have with someone in the street, the Socratic dialogues that the philosopher Plato wrote in Greek antiquity or the fictional conversations that the characters of a play.
While most texts use elements from these five categories, they are commonly classified according to their predominant intent: to tell, to describe, to influence, to inform, or to converse. This means that an argumentative text may well include explanations and descriptions, just as in a dialogue there may be narratives and arguments.
Differences between textual typologies and textual genres
Textual typologies are, simply, classifications of texts according to certain fundamental or predominant features. They are distinguished from textual genres in that the latter provide the reader with certain information regarding what they will find in the text, based on a series of norms and conventions of a historical, social and, sometimes, literary type.
This means that textual genres are pre-established formats for texts. For example, literary genres are textual genres, since they classify literary texts and tell us what expectations to have of each one: a novel surely includes many characters throughout an extensive narrative, while a poem will surely be a short and emotional text, in which the author's voice will communicate a subjective point of view.
However, in a novel we can find narratives, explanations, descriptions and dialogues, and it is probably more difficult to classify it as a purely narrative, descriptive or dialogical text. Even, sometimes, the textual genres attend only to the theme of the text, as is the case of a science fiction novel or a horror story: in both cases they anticipate what type of narration we will face. Instead, if we simply say “narrative text”, we have no idea what to expect, other than a series of events evoked one first and the other later.