What term refers to a continuous stretch of speech or written text that goes beyond a single sentence?

The correct answer is the term "discourse," which refers to a continuous stretch of speech or written text that goes beyond a single sentence. Discourse encompasses various forms of communication, including conversations, narratives, and written works, and focuses on how meaning is constructed and understood in a larger context rather than in isolated sentences. It highlights the relationships between sentences and how they work together to convey complex ideas, themes, and arguments. This is an essential concept in linguistics and language studies, especially in understanding how language functions in social contexts.

The other terms do not accurately describe the concept of a continuous stretch of text. "Text cognition" relates to the mental processes involved in understanding and interpreting text, without focusing specifically on the structure of the text itself. "Lexicon" denotes the vocabulary of a language or a person, reflecting individual words and their meanings rather than the structure of longer texts. "Syntax" is the study of sentence structure and how words combine to form sentences, but it does not extend to the organization of discourse as a whole. Understanding the distinction among these terms clarifies why "discourse" is the appropriate choice in this context.