Text Linguistics PDF

Chapter 8: Text Linguistics (Pages 165–184) Understanding a text requires recognizing how its components form a coherent whole. The term TEXT originated from the Latin texere (to weave). Text VS Discourse: 1. TEXT: it fixes ONE MOMENT of a speech ○ it can b...

Chapter 8: Text Linguistics (Pages 165–184) Understanding a text requires recognizing how its components form a coherent whole. The term TEXT originated from the Latin texere (to weave). Text VS Discourse: 1. TEXT: it fixes ONE MOMENT of a speech ○ it can be: written or spoken short or long ○ Text analysis → two approaches focusing on production (speaking/writing) interpretation (understanding/processing) These aspects complement each other, though text processors bring unique experiences and knowledge, creating variability. → Text is a static product, such as a written document or a transcribed speech. 2. DISCOURSE: it is the ongoing dynamic USE OF A LANGUAGE in the speech community → Discourse is dynamic, involving language in use, ★ Zellig S. Harris pioneered a structuralist method in the 1950s, describing the structure of texts analogously to phonology, morphology, and grammar. His method involved analyzing grammatical structures (e.g., clauses, nominalizations) and lexical content (subjects, verbs, objects) to identify patterns and equivalence classes, forming a grammar specific to the text. However, including meaning in text analysis is crucial for a comprehensive theory. ★ Other linguists, such as Van Dijk, developed text grammars emphasizing meaning over syntax. Coherence and cohesion are essential features of texts, distinguishing them from discourse, which refers to the dynamic, ongoing use of language in a community. Texts are static snapshots of this dynamic process and cannot be fully comprehended without considering their discourse context. This chapter investigates how texts function as coherent and cohesive units of communication. It delves into their internal structures and the interaction between form and meaning, highlighting key elements like cohesion, coherence, and the role of context. 1. Textual Cohesion → Defined as the linguistic devices that link sentences and clauses together. Various linguistic mechanisms that contribute to textual cohesion: ➔ Avoidance of repetition: Texts use substitutions (dummy words: "one(s)," "do," "it") to avoid repeating words in close proximity. ➔ Ellipsis: Certain elements of a sentence's grammatical structure can be omitted if the surrounding text provides enough context to infer the missing information. ➔ Repetition: Repeating the same word throughout a text creates cohesion by linking sentences together. Lexical Cohesion arises from relationships between words, such as: ◆ Synonymy: Words with similar meanings. Example: “The cat slept. The feline woke.” demonstrates cohesive ties through synonymy. ◆ Hyponymy: "Type-of" relationships (e.g., "dog" as a type of "animal"). ◆ Meronymy: "Part-of" relationships (e.g., "wheel" as part of "car"). ◆ Collocation: Words that frequently appear together. Grammatical Cohesion: Refers to pronouns, conjunctions, and ellipsis creating textual flow. Example: “John took an apple. He ate it.” where pronouns link sentences. 2. Coherence → Beyond grammar, coherence relates to the reader’s ability to derive meaning from context and shared knowledge. Texts rely on logical progression and thematic relevance. ○ Example: A recipe assumes the reader understands cooking conventions. To create connections within texts and linking them to broader contexts: → PRONOUNS AND REFERENCES: ❖ Third-person pronouns: Refer to entities, events, or situations within or outside the text. ❖ Anaphora: Refers back to an antecedent mentioned earlier. ❖ Cataphora: Refers forward to something mentioned later. ❖ Exophoric references: Refer to entities outside the text, relying on shared knowledge between speaker and hearer. → ARTICLES: Definite and indefinite articles: Signal whether something is previously mentioned or assumed to be known, connecting text with the interpreter’s background knowledge. → CONJUNCTIONS AND JUNCTIVE EXPRESSIONS: ❖ Conjunctions : Link propositions, often reflecting relationships like - addition (and), - contrast (but), - sequence (after). ❖ Junctive expressions: Depend on non-linguistic knowledge and help readers infer conceptual relations, such as causation or temporal sequence. 3. Temporal conjunctions (afterwards) imply varying degrees of time lapse between events. Clauses in texts achieve cohesion through linguistic structures and lexical relationships: ➔ Collocation: Words often co-occur in predictable patterns, such as nouns with related verbs or adjectives. These patterns may be general (common in language) or specific to a text. ➔ Reiteration and sense relations: Words are repeated or linked through relationships like: synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, or meronymy. ➔ Conjunctions and linking devices: Words like “and, but, after” establish relationships between clauses or sentences that can be: logical, temporal, or contrastive. ➔ Subjects and actors: The grammatical subjects represent key participants or entities in the "world" of the text, progressing from general categories to specific roles. ➔ Frames and coherence: Lexical choices reflect mental organization, such as legal contexts (judge ruled, courts, ruling), creating cohesion across sentences while drawing on shared conceptual knowledge. Overall, to summarise: - cohesion arises from grammatical structures and lexical ties, - coherence relies on the reader’s understanding of conceptual frameworks. The SUPERSTRUCTURE of texts, emphasizing how they are organized into conventional, recognizable sections (e.g., headline, byline, body in a newspaper report). Superstructure aids readers in navigating texts effectively. ➔ Story vs. Plot: - Story: The chronological sequence of events. - Plot: The order in which events are presented in the text, which may differ from the story's timeline. This "scrambling" can have various narrative effects. ➔ Temporal Cohesion: Texts use tenses and temporal markers to maintain cohesion and coherence, helping readers reconstruct the chronological order of events. Newspaper texts also provide explicit temporal anchors, such as publication dates. ➔ Background Knowledge: Readers rely on real-world knowledge to interpret event sequences. ➔ Cognitive Processing: The human brain processes these organizational patterns, temporal indicators, and narrative structures unconsciously and efficiently. 4. Features of Effective Texts: Intentionality: The writer’s purposeful communication. Acceptability: The reader's willingness to interpret the text meaningfully. Intertextuality: Connections to other texts, as seen in citations or cultural references. The chapter explains how these elements interact, often citing examples to illustrate how cohesion and coherence are achieved through contextual interplay. For instance, it contrasts a fragmented series of sentences with a cohesive paragraph to show the importance of lexical and grammatical ties. Chapter 23:Speech, Writing, and Discourse Type (Pages 514–532) This section examines the relationship between speech, writing, and the types of discourse they generate, focusing on differences and overlaps between the two modes. Differences between spoken and written language, considering how factors beyond the medium itself influence these differences. SPEECH WRITING FEATURES OF SPOKEN FEATURES OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE LANGUAGE It’s composed in real No filled or silent pauses. time, it represents what No incomplete words or we might call “stream of retraction. consciousness”; the words More complex are uttered only shortly grammatical structure, after being called to mind, such as subordinate pre planning is minimal. clauses. As a consequence, in Usually a more formal spoken language we can vocabulary. hear various types of Non-interactive text: retraction, that is going single narrator. back on what has just Punctuation. been said. Typeface. Use of pauses: silent ones or filled pauses (er, ehm). Not many complex sentence structures. Sequence of short independent clauses. Use of contracted forms rather than full forms. In conversation, usually, we have a more informal language than the one used in written texts. Non-verbal communication. → Degree of Fluency and Planning: Spoken language tends to be produced in real-time, meaning that speakers don’t plan their speech in advance or have the ability to edit it before speaking. This leads to features like retraction (taking back what has just been said), pauses, and filled pauses ("um"). The sentences are often short, independent clauses with minimal complexity. → Level of Formality: Spoken language is often informal, using contractions ("gonna" instead of "going to") and casual vocabulary ("cos" instead of "because"). This informality is a characteristic of many spoken discourse types. → Interactional Features: Spoken language is interactive, with features like turn-taking and overlapping speech. These features are absent in written language, especially when the text is non-interactive, as seen in the written example where there is no overlapping speech or turn-taking. → Unique Features of Spoken Language: Spoken language includes features that are absent in written texts, like prosody (intonation, rhythm, stress). Punctuation is unique to written language. → Spoken VS Written Texts: Speech is immediate and transient, Writing is durable and deliberate. While spoken language exhibits certain features like fluency, informality, and interactivity, many of these features also appear in written language, especially in informal or conversational writing.  The differences between spoken and written texts are not solely due to the medium but also due to psychological constraints (real-time composition), informality, and interactivity. So, the medium (oral or written) does not entirely determine the nature of communication; situational factors (e.g., formality, audience) are critical. ○ Example: A formal written speech versus an informal voice note may share a similar purpose despite medium differences. "PRIMACY OF SPEECH" IN LINGUISTICS. It suggests that language was originally a purely spoken phenomenon before writing was developed. This idea is rooted in the fact that speech predates writing both in human history and in the development of individual language skills, with children learning to speak before they learn to write. However, the relationship between speech and writing has become more intertwined, as our understanding of language is now influenced by written conventions. Key points include: Speech is considered to have primacy and writing has become integral to how we understand language. Modern language usage, including the rules of punctuation and word formation, has been influenced significantly by writing. For instance, in spoken language, the issue of compound nouns doesn’t arise, but in written language, the correct form is codified and more rigid. ➔ Prosody and Non-Verbal Communication: ○ Speech includes crucial meaning-bearing elements such as prosody (intonation, rhythm, pitch) and body language, which help disambiguate meanings and convey nuances in communication. These elements are absent in writing, which can sometimes lead to ambiguities or misunderstandings. To mitigate this, writers use metapragmatic markers, like punctuation, to help guide interpretation. ➔ Features of Writing: Despite its lack of prosody and body language, writing has its own valuable features: ➔ Punctuation: Helps readers identify grammatical structure and resolve ambiguities, facilitating clearer communication. ➔ Typeface and Font Shifts: ○ Typography can set the tone of a text (formal or informal) and emphasize particular words. ○ Font shifts, like italics, can be used for emphasis or to distinguish words from other languages. ➔ Metapragmatic Function in Writing: ○ Written language compensates for the lack of spoken cues (like tone or body language) by using punctuation and other markers (quotation marks). These devices can indicate direct speech or convey attitudes, which would otherwise rely on verbal cues in spoken communication. Variation in language is based on discourse type (or register), which refers to the systematic differences in texts depending on their context, audience, purpose, and linguistic features. These variations are categorized into text-external and text-internal approaches: Internal vs. External Criteria for Discourse Types 1. Text-external approach focuses on external factors such as: ○ Characteristics of the audience (e.g., age, social class, education, gender) ○ The author's characteristics ○ The relationship between the author and audience (e.g., formal or informal) ○ The overall purpose of the text. 2. Text-internal approach examines linguistic features within the text itself, such as vocabulary, syntax, sentence structure, and the overall tone or style. → Internal Criteria Linguistic features → External Criteria: Contextual factors such as : like sentence length, the relationship between the vocabulary range, speaker and listener, syntactic complexity. the purpose of the communication, the level of formality Genre and Text-Type Distinction: Genre: A way of classifying discourse types based on text-external features. It refers to socially recognized types of activities, like news articles or advertisements. - According to Fairclough (1992) → genre involves stable conventions linked to specific social activities. For example, in a job interview, a genre perspective would focus on: the purpose (getting a job), setting (commercial), participants,  Text type: Refers to discourse types classified based on internal linguistic features without reference to social practices. A text-type perspective would examine the structure of turns, speech acts, and formality levels. → Genre: Socially recognized forms like → Text-Type: Defined by linguistic news articles, characteristics, such as recipes, narrative, poems. descriptive, argumentative styles. Example: A newspaper article (genre) might employ a narrative text-type to recount a story. Checklist for Analyzing Discourse Types: Situational: Where and when is the discourse occurring? Interactional: What is the relationship between participants? Pragmatic: What is the intent behind the communication? Style → A combination: of - tenor = the relationship between participants, such as formal or informal, - mode = the medium, like spoken or written, - rhetorical mode = the communicative function of the text. Style reflects the characteristic linguistic features that distinguish one text from another. Sublanguage: A highly restricted variety of language used in specific contexts, often with a defined vocabulary and structure. A sublanguage typically reaches closure, meaning there is a lack of new words or structures. For instance, technical jargon or legal language is a sublanguage. Generic intertextuality or interdiscursivity: The blending or mixing of different discourse types in a single text. This occurs when a text borrows features from multiple genres or text types, such as magazine advertisements that mimic the style of other types of writing (news articles). ★ The British National Corpus (BNC) is a large computer database of British English that contains approximately 100 million words and over 4,000 individual text samples. It is designed to reflect a broad spectrum of British English usage, including both written and spoken texts. The BNC is divided into four main sections: ➔ Written Texts: ○ Imaginative texts: Fiction and poetry. ○ Informative texts: Non-fiction, such as academic articles, news, and reports. ➔ Spoken Texts: ○ Conversational speech: Everyday, informal spoken interactions. ○ Task-oriented speech: More formal, structured speech events such as lectures, doctor-patient consultations, and business meetings. A study by Rayson, Wilson, and Leech (2002) analyzed the frequencies of grammatical categories across these sections. Their hypothesis was that there would be a clear distinction between spoken and written sections, but the results showed that the distinction was not always clear-cut. The BNC revealed that the spoken sections contain a mixture of informal, spontaneous, and interactive speech events, as well as more formal and planned instances. Even within the more homogeneous imaginative writing section, interdiscursivity (the mixing of different genres and discourse types) played a role in shaping the texts. ➔ Medium-specific features = The distinction between speech and writing based purely on the medium (spoken vs. written) is minimal. The situational features of the text, formality, purpose, audience) play a much larger role in determining variation between texts. ➔ Situational features VS medium: It is important to avoid overly broad generalizations about language variation based solely on the medium (spoken or written) because these distinctions do not fully explain the variation. For example, task-oriented speech can range from informal meetings to formal church sermons, which blends both speech and writing characteristics. ➔ Caution in pre-imposed classifications: The BNC highlights that pre-imposed classifications of language variation (“spoken" vs. "written") might not fully capture the complexity of real-world texts, as many texts contain features from both categories. In conclusion, the BNC suggests that while medium plays a role in language variation, it is the situational context—such as the formality of the situation, the relationship between speakers, and the purpose of the discourse—that has a greater impact on shaping language use. The chapter also discusses overlaps between speech and writing, such as the increasing informality in modern emails (written communication) that mimic speech patterns. Chapter 26: Language in Literature: Stylistics (Pages 570–587) Stylistics connects the linguistic features of a text with its artistic and emotional impact. This chapter offers tools and examples for analyzing literary language, emphasizing how form contributes to meaning. Stylistics is concerned with the analysis of language in texts and how this analysis relates to our interaction with the text as readers. Key points: 1. Stylistics and Its Purpose Stylistics is the study of how the words and language of a text create meaning and how they affect the reader's understanding. Stylisticians analyze texts by examining linguistic features and these relate to the reader's experience of the text. Stylistics is not confined to literary texts, though literary works are often the focus. The analysis applies to all types of texts where language choices affect meaning. 2. Style, Meaning, and Choice ➔ Style and meaning are not just linguistic phenomena but are also shaped by non-linguistic activities and choices. ➔ Style in language (tone, pace, formality) is defined by consistent choices. - Just as in tennis or singing, different choices create distinct styles. ➔ In language, meaning is influenced by the choices of words or actions. ➔ Choice is central: without the ability to make choices in expression, there can be no difference in style. ○ In fact, choosing particular ways of saying something makes for differences in meaning. ➔ Foregrounding: Deviation causes behaviors or language to become more noticeable and interpretive. → The use of linguistic deviation and parallelism to draw attention. → producing a psychological For example, unusual linguistic behavior or dress is often questioned and examined more closely by others. Deviation:Making choices that deviate from the norm can highlight certain behaviors or language usage, making them stand out (e.g., wearing a bow tie in a setting where it’s uncommon). Breaking expected norms, such as unusual syntax effect ○ Example: “I wandered lonely as a cloud” disrupts standard prose patterns for poetic effect. Parallelism:When behaviors or linguistic structures mirror each other (matching clothing styles), it increases the foregrounding effect, making the choice more significant and noticeable. Repeated structures enhance rhythm and cohesion. (to catch attention). ○ Example: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds.” Appropriateness: Choices in language or behavior are often influenced by the context and the expected norms for that context (e.g., formal occasions requiring formal speech or dress). Linguistic choices can be arbitrary but sometimes are made to be iconic, fitting the subject matter (e.g., the sound of "quack" matching the sound ducks make). ➔ Reader Interaction: Stylistic features engage the reader by prompting interpretation and emotional response. Literary texts often layer meaning through ambiguity, metaphor, and tone. ★ Case Study: "Flying Crooked" by Robert Graves: A poem about a butterfly whose irregular flight becomes a metaphor for resilience. - Stylistic analysis highlights the poet’s use of irregular rhythm and enjambment to mimic the butterfly’s erratic movement.  ➔ Thematic and Stylistic Analysis: Stylistic tools analyze patterns in character speech, such as Lady Macbeth’s fragmented syntax reflecting guilt. Shakespeare’s Macbeth illustrates how meter and imagery create tension and portray psychological turmoil. This chapter also critiques the limitations of purely linguistic approaches to literature, advocating for an integration of reader response and cultural context.