Text and Discourse Analysis

Raphael Salkie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134872022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

A practical, `user-friendly' guide to the issues and methods associated with text and discourse analysis. Text and Discourse Analysis:

* examines a wide variety of authentic texts including news stories, adverts, novels, official forms, instruction manuals and textbooks
* contains numerous practical activities
* looks at a range of cohesive devices
* concludes by looking at larger patterns in texts, a set of further exercises and a guide for further reading
* provides a hands-on guide to an area of growing importance in language study.

PART I
LEXICAL COHESION

1
WORD REPETITION

In this chapter we shall look at how repeating key words can help to make a text coherent.

One thing that makes texts coherent is repeating important words. Look at this example:

(5) The descending sun is temporarily eclipsed by a huge water tower. Shadows play off the concrete embankments of the Los Angeles River and dance across the shallow trickle of sewage in its channel. A locomotive shunts a dozen containers of hazardous chemicals into a siding.

We are only five miles from downtown Los Angeles but have entered a world invisible to its culture pundits. This is LA’s old industrial heartland – the South-east.

It’s 4.30 p.m. Two workers are standing behind an immense metal table, partially shaded by a ragged beach umbrella. A portable radio is blasting rock and roll en espagnol, hot from Mexico City.

Each man is armed with a screwdriver, pliers and a hammer. Eduardo, the taller man, is from Guanajuato in North-central Mexico, and is wearing the navy-blue baseball cap favoured by so many of Los Angeles’s illegal immigrants.

Miguel, more slightly built and pensive, is from Honduras. They are unconsciously syncopating the beat as they alternate between hammering, prying and unscrewing. Towering in front of them is a 20-foot high mound of dead and discarded computer technology: obsolete word processors, damaged printers, virus-infected micros, last decade’s state of the art. The thankless task of Eduardo and Miguel is to smash up everything in order to salvage a few components that will be sent to England to recover their gold content.

Being a computer breaker is a monotonous $4.50-an-hour job in the underground economy. There are no benefits, or taxes. Just cash in a plain envelope every Friday.

Function words Content words

Many words are used more than once in this text. The word is occurs ten times, a fourteen times, and the ten times. Although these words play a part in making the text coherent, simply repeating them is not what counts. Any text in English is likely to contain many examples of these words: they are sometimes called FUNCTION WORDS. On the other hand, the text contains certain words which are used less often than these but occur more than once: these are called CONTENT WORDS; we wouldn’t expect to find them in every text, and they do help to make this a coherent text. Los Angeles, for instance, occurs three times (four if we count LA), the names Miguel and Eduardo each appear twice, and the word computer is used twice.

These are important words in this text. We can show this in two ways. First, if we had to give a summary of what this text is about, we might say something like ‘Illegal immigrants working as computer breakers in Los Angeles’, using two of the three repeated words we just picked out. And since Eduardo and Miguel are the people in question, we would expect the text to use their names more than once.

Second, we can show that if these words were not repeated, the text would make very little overall sense. If the second instance of Los Angeles instead said New York, the third Aberdeen and the fourth Doncaster, the unity of the text would disappear. The same is true if instead of repeating the men’s names, two quite different names were used (e.g. Alison and Kathryn); and if the second instance of computer was replaced by fish.

This may strike you as a rather bizarre way of looking at text (5). Obviously, whoever wrote this passage repeated these words because that is what she or he wanted to write about. Why would they possibly mention Aberdeen, or refer to ‘being a fish breaker’? But this is putting the cart before the horse. We are trying to account for the fact that text (5) comes across to us as coherent. No one told us in advance what the writer intended in this text: in fact, the only evidence we have about the writer’s intentions comes from the words on the page. When you read text (5), your assumption that it was a coherent text was confirmed. It’s possible to examine texts to find out why this is so, and that is what this book is concerned with.

EXERCISES

1. Find the important repeated words and phrases in the following texts

1. CRICKET AND HUMAN RIGHTS HEAD AGENDA
   From Robin Oakley in Harare
   A new friendlier style of Commonwealth heads of government meeting was promised yesterday. Chief Emeka Anyaoku, the Commonwealth secretary general, announced that the proceedings, which open formally tomorrow, will include a charity cricket match.
   Promised participants include John Major, Bob Hawke, the Australian prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister and Michael Manley, the Jamaican prime minister.
   But away from sport, there were signs that British hopes of improving the Commonwealth’s human rights record may run into snags. (6)
2. It took me a long time to pick myself up after my husband left me and our two young children. I’m 28. Eventually, though, through friends, I met a man. He has asked me out but I don’t know what to do. I still love my husband although he has said he doesn’t love me anymore. How can I learn to be comfortable with another man while I still have feelings for my husband? – Kathy. (7)
3. ‘Twenty-two,’ I called out to Angelina as I started for the kitchen door. Before I reached it two more policemen stepped through. And the main entrance was blocked by survivors of the original four.
   ‘Trapped!’ I shouted aloud, then touched the sonic screamer in my belt buckle. A number of the diners screamed in response as the vibrations produced feelings of terror. Nice. In the confusion I would escape through the fire exit hidden behind the drapes.
   Except this door wasn’t the only thing the drapes concealed. Two more policemen blocked my way. This was getting annoying. (8)
4. About one hundred house fires a year are caused by irons left on. And that’s a conservative figure. Which is why our Comfort 750 and Comfort 400 steam irons turn themselves off, after thirty seconds, when left face down. Why after thirty seconds, you may ask? Well, leave a hot iron on your best cotton shirt. It’ll begin to burn after thirty-two seconds. (9)

2. In the following extracts some repeated words and phrases have been left out, except for the first letters. Try to work out what these words and phrases might be. What clues did you use to get the answers?

1. NSS OFFERS A S__ PROGRAMME TO DEAL WITH RISING C__
   In the week that both the Conservatives and the Labour Party have unveiled new proposals to deal with the rising tide of c__, New Statesman & Society would like to outline its own, s__, solution. 1.Create a new o__ of leaving a motor v__ unattended in a public place. According to the most up-to-date figures for notifiable o__s recorded by the police, this could, at a stroke, put a stop to up to 28.5 per cent of recorded c__ - the 1.46 million o__s of theft of, or from, a v__.(10)
2. Not all s_ t__s are alike.
   On the one hand, there are ordinary s__ t__s which are usually no more than minor irritations. But when you have a se__ s__ t__, it can be a different story.
   By se__ we mean when talking can be difficult, when it’s hard to swallow, and when you feel as if there’s a continual lump in your t__. That’s when you need more serious attention.
   And that’s when you need Merocaine. Because Merocaine is a t__ lozenge with a difference. (11)
3. Anyone trying to push a boat over a dry, level beach meets with considerable opposition. The fo__ which tends to oppose every sliding movement between solids is called the fo__ of fr__. Fr__ is an important feature of everyday life. The brakes of a bicycle or car use the fr__ between fixed ‘brake blocks’ and the m__ wheel to slow it down. Of course this effect is not always an advantage. Fr__ between m__ parts on a vehicle is one of the main causes of wear. (12)
4. SAVING THE E__
   If p__ were the only threat, the e__ might be safe. The ban on i__ sales achieved at the last meeting of CITES (the Convention on International T__ in Endangered Species) three years ago was an historic achievement. A t__ going back 1,000 years was stopped. A slaughter which had so accelerated that the African e__ herd was halved in ten years was brought to a close. Pessimists who predicted prices would spiral through an illegal i__ trade fed by p__ were wrong. Some poaching continues, but only in a small way. (13)

3. As well as repeating words, some texts repeat patterns of words. This is a common device in speeches:

(14) The people of this country aren’t stupid. They know when politicians are lying to them. They know when newspapers are not giving them the full picture. They know when company directors on huge salaries are trying to make them feel guilty for wanting a decent living wage. And they know when their schools and hospitals are falling apart for lack of money.

What is repeated here isn’t just the words they know when but the pattern they know when x is doing y. The x and y change each time, but the pattern stays the same.

Pick out the repeated words and patterns of words in these examples:

1. Merocaine contains two carefully selected ingredients that provide powerful and rapid relief when a severe sore throat strikes.
   The first is benzocaine, a strong anaesthetic agent that quickly relieves the pain in your throat.
   The second is cetylpyridinium chloride, a powerful antibacterial agent that in clinical tests has been shown to destroy up to 99 per cent of bacteria in the mouth and throat. (15; continuation of example 11)
2. The future of teaching will now be determined on a one man, one vote system. [Picture of smiling politician.] This is the man.
   A review body on teachers’ pay and conditions will soon be appointed by the Education Secretary, Kenneth Clarke.
   It will consider only the issues chosen by Kenneth Clarke.
   Its proposals can be overruled by Kenneth Clarke.
   Changes to teachers’ pay...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• USING THIS BOOK
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: LEXICAL COHESION
• PART II: OTHER KINDS OF COHESION
• PART III: BEYOND COHESION
• FURTHER EXERCISES
• FURTHER READING