textuale

Textuale is a term occasionally used in linguistics and literary studies to denote a text-centered approach to analysis that foregrounds the properties of texts themselves—structure, cohesion, discourse, and context—over purely linguistic units such as sounds or morphemes. In this usage, textual analysis treats a document as a unified artifact whose meaning emerges from the arrangement of sentences, paragraphs, and rhetorical moves, rather than from individual words alone.

The form resembles the French textuelle or the Italian testuale and is sometimes presented as a coinage to stress the textual dimension of analysis. It is not a widely standardized term in major dictionaries, and its appearance in the literature is limited and heterogeneous.

In application, textuelle analysis can accompany close reading by systematizing textual features such as cohesion devices, repetition, narrative structure, and genre conventions. In computational linguistics and information retrieval, the notion has been used to describe representations that emphasize document organization and discourse over lexical content, aiding tasks such as classification and summarization.

Critics note that the term can be ambiguous and overlap with established concepts like textuality, discourse analysis, and narratology. When used, it should be clearly defined within the study to avoid conflation with existing terminology.

See also: textuality, textual criticism, discourse analysis, narratology, text mining.