TEUN A. VAN DIJK Foundations for Typologies of Texts*

1.1. If we want to group certain objects into classes, these classes into larger classes, and if such a procedure somehow makes sense, scientifically speaking, it is important that we try to make explicit the criteria under-lying such classifications. Similarly, we have to know which methodol-ogical, theoretical, and empirical procedures are basic for a formal classification of texts as different TYPES, This problem is relevant for both linguistics and poetics. Moreover, the other social sciences dealing with verbal behaviour and textual interaction, e.g., social psychology, content analysis, and cultural anthropology, will also be interested in such differentiations in the domains of study. 1.2. In order, then, to gain some insight into this problem of formal typologies of texts in general and of literary texts in particular, we shall first try to enumerate some features of the very notion of `type ' itself. This procedure is not wholly superfluous, because all disciplines seem to have their own specific implications of the general, and therefore am-biguous, concept of type. That is, any beginning science will normally distinguish CLASSES of empirical objects, within the global subject matter it is supposed to describe and to explain, according to sets of distinctive features. These sets, initially, may be wholly implicit, i.e., represent our intuitive and global knowledge of the empirical world. Thus any nativ