What is Text?

There are commonalities between different fields that can be led back to text usage. For example, in humanities one has a text corpus recording a set of writings, one has a concordance showing all occurrences of each particular word in the corpus, and one has a dictionary recalling what meanings the words were used in the corpus with. And in software engineering one has a source code repository, the IDE facilitates passing through all instances of a type or all times a particular function is invoked and jumping to the place in the source code where they are defined. In both cases the involved structures are identical. The people that work in humanities and software development are of course thinking about very different things, but the logical structure they use is the same. I call this structure ”text.“ A text is a symbolic structure that is expressed by means of language. There are properties of the text by itself: it can be ordered as a hierarchy, as a list, etc., some parts of it refer to others as in cross-references, quotations, hyperlinks, etc., and there are properties of the language itself: it consists of comparatively few words —the lexis— that can be chained up in different ways to produce a huge amount of different sentences, they combine flexibly, but not completely free —the grammatic— and for a particular text or text group they can be given a particular meaning. The usage of text is not restricted to both fields mentioned above. Practically all human activities are infused with text. Consider just law, politics, science, business. Everywhere there are prose writings, there are dictionaries, there are lists of things to do, to evaluate or to talk about. If we analyze and understand the general text structure we will be able to construct computer systems that assist us to handle with text in general. Computer aided text management will benefit many fields.