texteme

From text +‎ -eme.

texteme (plural textemes)

1. (linguistics) A unit of text, large enough to have intelligible meaning, that stands in relationship to other units of text.
   • 1991, Kitty M. van Leuven-Zwart, Antonius Bernardus Maria Naaijkens, Translation Studies: The State of the Art, →ISBN:

     In our exemplary case, that of the tension between textemes and repertoremes, this may imply the promotion of the "adequate" option which, even though often advocated by teachers and critics, proved to be marginal in actual practice, namely 'to replace SL-text textemes by ad hoc combinations of textual relations equivalent to those found in that text and TL-items capable of fulfilling equivalent textual functions,' even if, as a result, certain deviations from target-repertories would occur, with possible bearings on the text's well-formedness.

   • 2000, Cees Koster, From World to World, →ISBN:

     The unit of comparison within this procedure is the texteme, which is defined as a linguistic unit of any type and level, participating in textual relationships and, as a result, carrying textual functions (Toury 1980: 108). The texteme, then, pertains to the level of the text function, it is a concept that directly mediates between the macrostructure and the microstructure. Any texteme can be broken down into elements belonging to a lower order.

   • 2006, Hans J. Vermeer, Luhmann's "social Systems" Theory, →ISBN, page 54:

     It is unknown, how much of the texteme was changed in the meantime during the processes of converting the texteme into a text into a texteme into a text .... whilst copying it.

   • 2012, Iulian Boldea, Memory, Identity and Intercultural Communication, →ISBN, page 285:

     However, stating the fundamentally unanalyzable nature of the textemes would represent a brutal deformation of Coşeriu's approach, since, in fact, the founder of Integralism does not assert it.

This term is used primarily in the context of translation.