What are the criteria of a text as a discourse?

7 Criteria You Need to Know 

There are 7 seven criteria a written or a spoken text qualifies as a discourse as suggested by Beaugrande (1981). These include:

• Cohesion - grammatical relationship between parts of a sentence essential for its interpretation;
• Coherence - the order of statements relates one another by sense.
• Intentionality - the message has to be conveyed deliberately and consciously;
• Acceptability - indicates that the communicative product needs to be satisfactory in that the audience approves it;
• Informativeness - some new information has to be included in the discourse;
• Situationality - circumstances in which the remark is made are important;
• Intertextuality - reference to the world outside the text or the interpreters' schemata;

They are important but nowadays, however, not all of the above mentioned criteria are perceived as equally important in discourse studies, therefore some of them are valid only in certain methods of the research (Beaugrande 1981, cited in Renkema 2004:49).

Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers (Cambridge Language Teaching Library)

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