To put it in another way, can we replicate the appearance of these text views without using the android:textAppearance attribute?
Like biegleux already said:
If you want to use the small, medium or large value on any text in your Android app, you can just create a dimens.xml file in your values folder and define the text size there with the following 3 lines:
<dimen name="text_size_small">14sp</dimen>
<dimen name="text_size_medium">18sp</dimen>
<dimen name="text_size_large">22sp</dimen>
Here is an example for a TextView with large text from the dimens.xml file:
<TextView
android:id="@+id/hello_world"
android:text="hello world"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:textSize="@dimen/text_size_large"/>