Text Structure Analysis

5 Key excerpts on "Text Structure Analysis"

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  eBook - ePub

  Language, Literature and Critical Practice

  Ways of Analysing Text

  • David Birch(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  29 The structuralist linguistic approach to the analysis of text can be summarized as follows: 1  There is emphasis on the need to be formally explicit and rigorous in the analysis of linguistic structures.

  2  This explicitness is designed to enable the analysis of texts to exemplify the idealized world of linguistic systems rather than the actual world of real discourses, though with critical linguistics this situation is changing.

  3  There are two main approaches to structuralist linguistic analysis of text: the psychological and the sociological. Both are concerned with understanding the system of language, but the sociological is more concerned with situationally determined meanings than is the psychological.

  4  The concentration on understanding linguistic systems involves a greater emphasis on universals and codes of language. This type of analysis of literary text is therefore much more about isolating universal linguistic structures, codes, and myths than it is with textual interpretations, explanations of readings, and discussions of intuitions about texts. This is the theoretical base of the structuralist linguistic enterprise, though in practice many literary-based linguists more interested in discourse analysis and textual explication than in developing theoretical arguments and philosophies concentrate on a linguistics that is effectively a language-aware practical criticism. It is therefore important to distinguish between the linguistics-theorists who conduct text analysis for systemic reasons and the applied linguists/critics who conduct text analysis for purposes of evaluation and interpretation.

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  Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts

  A Guide to Research Practices

  • Ruth Finnegan(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 Analysing and comparing texts: style, structure and content

  Most accepted methodologies within literary and linguistic study can in principle be applied to oral texts once they are represented in written form. Indeed textual analysis has often been taken as the method for studying verbal forms, following the model of text as something bounded and organised, a unit through which the traditional methods of philological and literary scholarship can be extended to unwritten forms. Rather than trying to cover all these methodologies, I have concentrated here on those particularly exploited in analysing oral forms (with some brief further discussion in 8.5 ). I have also mainly left to one side the problematics within the concept of text (on which see 1.4 ) or its broader sense as ‘any coherent complex of signs’ (Bakhtin 1986:103), so the focus here, as in most traditional forms of textual analysis, is primarily on textsas-verbal.

  The presentation is within a vaguely historical order, but methodologies in practice overlap in time and coverage, and ‘old’ methods take on new twists. Some topics such as typology or narrative could have been treated under several heads, while terms like ‘style’ and ‘structure’ can be interpreted in differing senses (here ‘style’ is mainly taken as lower-level aspects, ‘structure’ as more the overall form and its constituent divisions). Amidst these continuing over-laps and ambiguities, the categories and ordering here are for convenience not definitive classification.

  8.1 TEXTUAL ANALYSIS: PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES

  There are continuing arguments about the value of focusing on verbal texts. Some issues are broadly theoretical and concern such questions as the evaluation of contrasting perspectives for studying oral forms or problems in the concept of ‘text’. Others relate to practical questions of access or resources. It may thus be as well not to take it for granted that analysing the verbal text-as-given is the only possible focus, but also to weigh up such questions as the following:

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  Discourse and the Translator

  • B. Hatim, Ian Mason(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Prospects 1986:338)

  In Text 9I , an evaluative note is stuck immediately (… have relatively little autonomy ). Implicitly, this statement counters some unstated case (that ‘in the US, schools are autonomous’). The initial thesis cited is then argued through in the rest of the text.

  PUTTING TEXT DESIGNS TO USE IN SUMMARISING

  Insights into the various designs explained above are important not only as an aid to better comprehension in general but also in activities such as summarising and reporting, which translators are often called upon to perform. The structure of the source text becomes an important guide to decisions regarding what should or should not appear in the derived text. It is noticeable that translator trainees often find summarising to be a process which has no clear rules. But, with closer attention to structural criteria, the skill should be amenable to much more systematic treatment.

  It may be objected that translators often have to work with source texts which are far from being well constructed. Indeed, this is quite frequently the case. But, in order to be able to identify deviations, one has to have a clear idea of some norm. In deciding that a text is poorly constructed, the translator must have a notion of the conventions to which a text is expected to conform and it is only the intervention of the translator that will rid the target version from design shortcomings in the source text. This is yet another area where arguments about the translator's freedom can be seen in more realistic terms. The purpose of text structure is to serve a rhetorical purpose and, in striving to achieve equivalence, the translator seeks first and foremost to relay that purpose, making modifications accordingly.

  TEXTS IN RELATION TO DISCOURSE

  In this chapter, we have identified three units of structure: the element, the sequence and the text. Naturally, this raises the question of whether there is any larger identifiable unit than the text. Certainly texts concatenate within larger stretches of discourse. But, beyond the level of the text, it is difficult to perceive any regularly occurring patterns which would enable us to identify a unit of structure. Discourse is diffuse and can only be analysed by relating actual expression to the belief systems, power structures, etc., which underlie it. Translators find these to be important indicators of the attitudes to be conveyed. But, the attitudinal or ideological drift of a text is patterned in textual structures such as the ones we have discussed. These are the tangible linguistic units which guide the translator's work.

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  News As Discourse

  • Teun A. van Dijk(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Discourse analysis does more than just describe textual structures. In the previous section it became clear that in pragmatics action is also involved. The same holds when we describe structures of dialogues. That is, discourse is not just text but also a form of interaction. A plea in court is not only a sequence of coherent sentences that define a discourse type but also a particular juridical form of action, which only specific participants may perform at specific moments. In other words, a full-scale analysis of discourse involves an integration of text and context in the sense that the use of a discourse in a social situation is at the same time a social act. Similarly, the interpretation and production of a text involves the mental processes of interpretation and formulation, the retrieval and use of knowledge, and other strategies of the cognitive dimension of discourse. Meanings of discourse, therefore, are merely an abstraction from these cognitive interpretation processes, much in the same way that utterances and speech acts are only abstractions of real social actions in social situations. Hence, a complete empirical account of discourse also requires a description of cognitive processes of discourse production and understanding and of social interactions in sociocultural situations. Engaging in discourse means engaging in interpretation processes and social interaction, and a description of the cognitive and social contexts, therefore, is not a task that lies outside of discourse analysis. This does not mean that discourse analysis has as its proper task the full description of cognitive processes and social situations, which are objects of research for psychology and sociology. Rather it is interested in the systematic relationships between text and context. That is, it wants to know how cognitive processes specifically affect the production and understanding of discourse structures and how discourse structures influence and are influenced by the social situation. Thus, it was already suggested that style can be appropriately analyzed only when it is taken as an indication of the personal and the social contexts. Many aspects of discourse meaning, such as macrostructures and coherence, can be fully understood only if we know which cognitive representations of discourse and knowledge are involved during interpretation.

  The questions asked here address the uses, effects, or the functions of discourse in contexts of communication. This carries discourse analysis into various social sciences, which also include social psychology and mass communication, and shows that the study of discourse analysis must indeed be interdisciplinary. Issues such as the change of knowledge, beliefs and attitudes, therefore, also belong to the discourse analytical inquiry when they involve the uses of discourse. Yet, the theoretical instruments must be borrowed from other disciplines. A full account of news discourse, then, requires both a description of textual structures of news and a description of the production and reception processes of news discourse in communicative situations and sociocultural contexts.

  Thematic Structures

  Theoretical Introduction

  Perhaps even more than for other discourse types, the thematic organization of news discourse plays a crucial role. Therefore, this systematic analysis of the textual structures of news begins with an explication of notions like theme or topic. Intuitively, a topic or theme is what the discourse is about, globally speaking. Similarly, the topic of a lecture or a book is more or less equivalent with what we understand by its subject or subject matter. We then refer to the most important, central, or dominant concepts of a lecture or book. The same is true when we speak about the topic of a conversation. Such a topic is a summary or the gist of a conversation. We see that in English we have several terms to denote more or less the same concept. In this chapter we alternatively express this concept by the words "topic" or "theme."

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  The Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia

  • Kirsten Malmkjaer(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  T

  Text linguistics

  Background

  As Hoey points out (1983–4: 1),

  there is a tendency … to make a hard-and- fast distinction between discourse (spoken) and text (written). This is reflec-ted even in two of the names of the discipline( s) we study, discourse analysis and text linguistics. But, though the distinction is a necessary one to maintain for some purposes … it may at times obscure similarities in the organisation of the spoken and written word.

  The distinction Hoey mentions is made in this volume on practical, not theoretical grounds, and the overlap between text linguistics and discourse and conversation analysis should be borne in mind.

  Early modern linguistics, with its emphasis on discovering and describing the minimal units of each of the linguistic levels of sound, form, syntax and semantics, made no provision for the study of long stretches of text as such; traditional grammatical analysis stops at sentence length. It is even possible to argue that ‘the extraction of tiny components diverts consideration away from the important unities which bind a text together’ (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 21) and, although Zellig Harris (1952) had proposed to analyse whole discourses on distributional principles, employing the notion of transformations between stretches of text, this emergent interest in text and discourse study was lost at the time in Chomsky’s modification of the notion of transformation to an intrasentential phenomenon.

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