textuellen

Textuellen is a term used in some circles of linguistics and digital humanities to denote the basic textual units used in analysis. It refers to the units that carry meaning within a text under a given analytic framework, ranging from individual words to larger segments such as phrases or clauses, depending on the granularity chosen by the researcher. The term is a neologism and not part of a universally adopted standard; its precise definition varies with methodology and domain.

In practice, defining textuellen involves setting a segmentation strategy and a criterion for semantic coherence. Tokenization, syntactic parsing, and discourse segmentation are common tools to identify textuellen. Analysts may treat textuellen as words (lexical units), as multiword expressions, or as larger discourse units, and may assign annotations such as part-of-speech, lemma, or semantic role to them.

Textuellen are used in corpus linguistics, authorship and stylistic analysis, information retrieval, and natural language processing. The concept emphasizes functional units over rigid formal categories, acknowledging that unit boundaries can differ across languages and tasks. Critics note that the lack of standardization can hinder comparability, and that the choice of granularity impacts results.

Related concepts include tokens, lexemes, n-grams, discourse units, segmentation, corpus linguistics, and text analysis. The term remains primarily a descriptive label for approaches to unit-based text analysis rather than a universally adopted technical standard.