The three remaining standards of textuality are concerned with information structure, the relevance of the text to its situation of occurrence and the relationship of the text to other texts. We have changed the original term in the second case – relevance replacing situationality – but retain the original definition.
Texts contain information and a measure of that is the informativity of the text. However, the calculation is not a simple one but depends on the notions of choice and probability. A text is seen as the realization of choices made from among sets of options. There are, at each point where a choice can be made, actual choices which are more, or less, probable. The less probable and predictable a choice is, the more informative and interesting it is. Conversely, choices which are wholly predictable are uninformative and uninteresting.
However, too much information (the density of occurrence of the unpredictable exceeding some upper limit) renders the text unreadable, while the converse - too little information (the density of occurrence of the unpredictable failing to reach a threshold) – renders it readable but not worth reading. Just what the limits are is an issue. Typically, texts will contain the highly predictable, the likely and the unpredictable and it is the balance of these which makes a text readable and also interesting.
Three orders of informativity have been suggested, based on the assessment of a choice as falling within a range of probability: (1) upper, (2) lower and (3) outside the range.10 We can illustrate this by examining a short text11 in which choices at all three levels occur (each sentence has been numbered for ease of reference):
(1) Friar Sparks sat wedged between the wall and the realizer.
(2) He was motionless except for his forefinger and his eyes.
(3) From time to time his finger tapped rapidly on the key upon the desk, and now and then his irises, gray-blue as his native Irish sky, swivelled to look through the open door of the toldilla in which he crouched, the little shanty on the poopdeck.
In sentence (1) we have mainly second-order choices until we reach the last word; realizer. We only know two things about a 'realizer': (a) that it is something which 'realizes' something. This we know by analogy with equalizer, etc.; lexical knowledge which we bring into play at the stage of syntactic analysis as the lexical search mechanism comes into play and (b) that a seated man can be wedged between it and a wall.
Sentence (2) is also second-order, though forefinger is odd, and does nothing to resolve the problem of the 'realizer'.
Again, in sentence (3), second-order choices dominate, though key is third-order, as is toldilla - which is glossed as 'little shanty' almost immediately – and poopdeck, since we certainly do not expect a nautical term relating to sailing-ships.
There follows, in the original text, a four-line paragraph from which we infer that the monk is on the Santa Maria and is sailing with Columbus across the Atlantic on the voyage which culminated in the discovery of America. We still, however, do not know what a 'realizer' is. What follows (we shall number as if we had reproduced the paragraph just referred to) gives us more clues by providing more second-order information and, thereby, building up a clearer context for the reader to process:
(8) The single carbon filament bulb above the monk's tonsure showed a face lost in fat and in concentration. (9) The luminiferous ether crackled and hissed tonight, but the phones clamped over his ears carried, along with them, the steady dots and dashes sent by the operator at the Las Palmas station on the Grand Canary.
Sentence (8) begins with a choice which, in the context of what has gone before, is outside the set of probable options; carbon filament bulb, where we might expect guttering candle or the like. The phrase a face lost in fat and in concentration is a nice example of zeugma (cf. she left in a Rolls and a flood of tears).
Sentence (9) increases the density of improbable – and, therefore, highly informative – choices; ether, phones, dots and dashes, operator, station. We now know what a 'realizer' is but at the expense of accepting an imagined world (the text-world) in which electricity and radio had been discovered and were in use in 1492 and (Irish) monks acted as radio operators, receiving messages in Morse from senders at transmitters on such places as the Canaries (Grand Canary being the island rather than some mythical potentate of cage-birds).
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