Riassunto "How to Analyse Texts", Dispense di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Riassunto "How to Analyse Texts" e più Dispense in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! Lingua e traduzione inglese II B Programma completo How to Analyse Texts Part I Gathering more materials Your summary is, in effect, a description of you as a language resource. Keep a note of interesting examples of language use that you see and/or hear. Ideally, if you want to record people in conversation, you should ask the permission of the speakers. However, researchers recognise that the very act of doing this can alter what would otherwise occur naturally, for example by people saying what they think you want to hear, or by being on their best behaviour. This idea of the researcher affecting the results of their own research is called the observer’s paradox. Sometimes, a compromise position is reached where recording is covert (if it really has to be) and then permission is asked afterwards – and may be refused. In any case, whatever is transcribed for public view must not reveal any details about the participants’ lives, such as their names, where they live, where they work, and so on. Having established the idea that you need to look around constantly for interesting texts, the next issue is how to store them. You may well end up with a variety of text types. How you organise your collection is up to you, but you will need a system that is searchable and logical. 1 Sizing up the job: questions, scope and focus WH-question words can seem very minor, but can address important questions in text analysis: • What? What happens in a text is always going to be of interest, regardless of the research question. • Who? Who the participants were, and how they related to each other • Where? The physical setting for a conversation or text is also an important determinant of language choices and meanings. • When? The time of a text occurrence is also an important factor. Language changes constantly, as do our attitudes towards different expressions. • How? This question is all about how the language choices in a text work – how they connect with each other and build into a pattern that can be read or understood in particular ways. • Why? Why is the language as it is? This is a question that can take us beyond the text and into many different sociocultural aspects, reflecting the discourses that are current in any culture at a specific time, including ideas about what is appropriate for different audiences and purposes. There is no fixed pathway for a language exploration, and there is no right or wrong approach, but clear and realistic aims and plans are important. 2 Preparing the ground Reading and note-making are different but related activities. Reading helps you to acquire ideas and information, while note-making helps you to retain and revisit those ideas. Reading is always good as an activity in its own right, but if your note-making is poor, then you may well forget a lot of the ideas you come across. The reading you do will be for different reasons. For example, you may want to consult a thesaurus in order to explore the language choices in a text, because you want to know what synonyms there are for some of the terms – in other words, to explore the language choices that were not made. That kind of reading is different from reading an article or part of a textbook, where you will be looking for ideas about how to approach an analysis of particular types of text. Whatever reading you do, you need to keep a record of the resources you have consulted, including the title and author of the book or article, as well as its publication details (place and date of publication for a book; date, volume, and part for a journal article; web reference and date of access for an online publication). Page numbers are important where you cite an author’s actual words. There are many different guides to referencing, and different referencing conventions, but a frequently used method in arts and humanities subjects is the Harvard system. Reporting The best styles of writing for text analysis aim for clarity, using neither of these extremes but what might be described as a ‘statement style’, where features are described and ideas proposed, but where individuals are neither artificially excluded nor given centre stage. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use a passive structure when you want to; nor does it mean that you can never use ‘I’. However, try to sound clear and natural rather than trying to script yourself in a forced way. 5 Part II Section A - Graphological and Phonological levels Definitions The term graphology refers to the visual aspects of language, and for that reason it is more closely associated with writing than with speech. The term phonology refers to the study of the sound system of a language, which can form the basis for understanding how different languages (and different dialects of the same language) can have different numbers of phonemes, or individual sounds. The term phonetics refers to a more detailed focus on how sounds are produced, and on the subtle variations that can occur between different articulations of the same sound. Language as a semiotic system Language is sometimes referred to as a semiotic system. This means that it is thought of as a system where the individual elements – signs – take their overall meaning from how they are combined with other elements. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), a Swiss linguist who is often credited by Western scholars with founding the study of European linguistics, saw language as one of many signing systems that worked alongside each other. Working at the turn of the twentieth century, he coined the term semiology to describe ‘the science of signs’, believing that it was important to go beyond language in the narrowest sense and develop theories about how other signing systems worked. For students of language, semiotics has strong connections with both semantics and pragmatics. There are connections with semantics in the sense of the overall meaning of a text, and the way in which any text is part of a larger system of significance. There are also connections with pragmatics because pragmatics is all about assumed knowledge – what is implied and inferred, rather than directly said. What are the rules? The sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1857–1913) designed a specific research method in order to test whether a rule operated in a culture. His advice to researchers who thought they had identified a rule was that they should deliberately break the rule. He claimed that if this provoked a reaction from the members of the culture, it was proof that a rule was indeed in operation. Of course, rules are not static. Societies change and evolve new social practices for a variety of reasons, including technological developments. Signs and symbols In semiotic studies the idea of signs is divided into different categories, two major categories being signs that are iconic and those that are symbolic. An iconic sign tries to be a direct picture of what it refers to. A symbolic sign is not a picture of what is being referred to (the referent), but a picture of something that we associate with the referent. Signs are extremely culturally specific. 6 Sounds and symbols There is a relationship between spoken and written language. Although speech and writing are related to each other, they are not simply different versions of the same thing. Linguists try to create representations that allow us to recapture something of the original. One of the written systems that tries to do this is called the IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet, which uses symbols designed specifically to represent the sounds of language. The underlined part of the word given as an example of each sound refers to how that sound would be produced by someone with a Received Pronunciation (RP) accent. This accent does not indicate the region a speaker comes from, but rather their social class, as historically it was the voice of educated people from privileged backgrounds. If a speaker has a different accent from RP, their list of phonemes (termed a phoneme inventory) might well be different from the one opposite. There are forty-four sounds in English and yet there are only 26 letters that we can use to represent them. While the same string of letters can represent different pronunciations, conversely one sound can be represented by different written symbols. Speech sounds are produced in the vocal tract, using air pushed out from the lungs. Different speech sounds are made by changing the shape of the vocal tract. This can be done by moving the lips and tongue to touch different parts of the vocal tract (place of articulation). Sounds can be further modified by placing the articulators different distances from one another (manner of articulation). We can make an even wider variety of sounds by vibrating the vocal folds (voiced sounds) or not vibrating them (voiceless sounds). p b t d k g are plosives. These sounds are all explosions: they are created by obstructing the flow of air by bringing parts of the mouth together, then letting go suddenly. English plosives (also called ‘stops’) are differentiated from each other in two ways: they are made in different places in the mouth (place of articulation), and they use different amounts of voice (voiced or voiceless sound). Each of these pairs of sounds has one voiced and one voiceless phoneme, as follows: p, t and k are voiceless, while b, d and g are voiced. f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ h are fricatives. While plosives are produced by completely obstructing the airflow, fricatives involve a lesser obstruction where air is forced through in a steady stream, resulting in friction rather than explosion. Fricatives, like plosives, are distinguished from each other by their place of articulation and by voice, each pair below being made up of a voiceless and voiced phoneme – apart from /h/, which is voiceless but has no voiced partner in English: f θ s ʃ h are voiceless, while v ðz ʒ are voiced. tʃ and dʒ are affricates. There are only two of these consonant sounds in English. They have double symbols to represent the fact that each one is a plosive followed by a fricative. If you make these sounds at very slow speed you may be able to hear this sequence. /tʃ/ is voiceless and /dʒ/ is its voiced partner. m n ŋ are nasals. The distinctive feature of these sounds is that they are produced in a particular manner: the airstream comes out through the nose rather than the mouth. They 7 Part II Section B - Lexical and semantic level Frequent words Through the most frequent words in written English, we can find the, to, and and been. The reference function for language is crucial, both in speech and writing. Reference means pointing things out. Being able to point and name the world around them is an important stage in young children’s acquisition of language. Written texts need to create a world that makes sense on its own terms. The words ‘a’ and ‘the’ are termed ‘articles’; ‘a’ is an indefinite article and ‘the’ is a definite article. We can use these words to refer to many different phenomena, with ‘the’ being used to refer to something specific, possibly even unique, while ‘a’ can refer to a single item, possibly among many. Book, newspaper and magazine titles, as well as institutions of different kinds, also often use ‘the’ to suggest the authority that comes with the idea of being ‘the one and only’. The word ‘a’, on the other hand, can suggest repeated or common occurrences as well as a single item. Pronouns allow us to refer easily to people, by replacing their names (proper nouns) with items that stand in their place (hence pro-nouns). The corpus list includes the following personal pronouns: I, he, she, it, you, they. Variants of the pronoun forms above – me, him, her, them – are used when the pronouns are the object in a sentence. Of these, the list features ‘him’ and ‘her’. It also features the possessive pronoun, ‘his’. Pronouns are seemingly small words that can have great significance. They can identify participants and specify both their number (a single person or a group) and their gender (male or female, plus a sort of neuter in the term ‘it’). Although ‘a’ and ‘the’ can have a pointing (deictic) function, there are some terms on the list of corpus items that are perhaps more easily seen in that way. ‘This’, ‘that’ and ‘there’ are examples of terms that can have a very direct pointing function in face to face communication, to identify and delineate shared space. Where terms point backwards, they are called anaphoric references; where they point forwards, they are called cataphoric. Further words or parts of words on the corpus list help us to understand which time period is being referred to. A different kind of function from reference is conjunction, or linking elements together. For example, ‘and’ and ‘but’ – have this connecting function, helping us to understand how one part of a text relates to another. Many of our most frequently used words may be tiny and seem insignificant, but in fact they serve to help convey some powerful meanings. However, they do not make sense collectively. A language needs both grammatical words and lexical words. The words we have been discussing in the frequency list are almost all grammatical words, whereas words such as school or football are lexical words. The grammatical words more or less provide the structures within which the lexical words make their meanings; the function of the 10 grammatical words is largely to structure the lexical words which carry a higher informational content than the individual grammatical words. Grammatical words are generally finite and do not change much over time in either structure or meaning; however, the number of lexical words is potentially infinite, with new words entering and disappearing from the language all the time. A morpheme is the smaller unit of language which help to structure and convey meanings. The study of the structure of words is called morphology. Words may be made up of one or more morphemes. For example, the word inexpensive consists of three morphemes in, expens(e) and ive. There are two main classes of morpheme. There are those morphemes which are independent and free-standing as words (free morphemes), e.g. laugh, city, money, and those morphemes which cannot stand on their own (bound morphemes) because their meaning depends on being attached to a free morpheme. Examples of bound morphemes are in-, -s, -ed, -ly, anti-, -ism, dis-, -hood. Bound morphemes have two functions. One is to act as a grammatical marker, giving information about number, verb tense, aspect and other grammatical functions. These are inflectional morphemes. Examples are -s, -ed, -er (comparative). The second function is to form new words. These are called derivational morphemes. Examples are un-, -ly, -hood, -y, dis-, -ship. 11 Forming words Affixation involves the addition of prefixes and suffixes to words. Suffixes are a key class of the derivational morphemes discussed above, and they commonly enable different word classes to be recognised. Some examples are: -er, -or are commonly used to describe people who do things (actor, employer) for suffixes; post means ‘after’ and un- means ‘not’ (postgraduate, unnecessary) for prefixes. Compounding refers to the process by which two or more existing words (free morphemes) are combined to form new words. Compounds can result in verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Some of these combinations involve hyphens between the words (old-fashioned; sugar-free). Conversion is a process by which different words are changed from one word class to another (download is a noun from a verb). Words can also be created by other means such as abbreviations, blends, acronyms and initialisms: • Abbreviations: ad (advertisement); • Blends: blog (web and log); • Acronyms (initials said as words): NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation); • Initialisms (said as letters): SMS (short messaging service). The processes of affixation, compounding and conversion are regularly applied to English words, regardless of the languages they came from originally. English has absorbed many words from different languages over the years, during many periods of cultural contact and conquest. 12 Words and metaphors Words can also act as metaphors. Metaphors are made when words are used to create an ‘as if’ world; that is, the word or words are compared to something to which they are not normally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance. The resulting comparison shows how two things that are not normally alike in most ways are similar in another important way. For example, we have: • Orientational metaphors: “happy” is up (I’m in high spirits; things are looking up); “sad” is down (She was very low after the exams). • Ontological metaphors: Life is a journey (Some travel towards clear destinations; others seem to have no direction; many lose their way). Lexical cohesion The study of connections across a text is called cohesion. It involves awareness of grammar as well as vocabulary, and the next section will focus on grammatical patterns, taking the idea of cohesion further. Aspects of lexical cohesion don’t have to be complex: the process of simple repetition is a basic way in which different parts of a text can echo each other. However, all the other areas that have been explored in this section – from word families to semantic fields – also play their part in knitting a text together. Cohesion is a resource for writers in their process of composition; it is also a resource for readers in their comprehension and textual interpretation. 15 Part II Section C - Grammatical level Grammar and cohesion There are some important aspects of grammatical cohesion that not only tie the text together, but also make the order of sentences look logical and help the text to move forward. Conjunctions like then are an important aspect of grammatical cohesion. There are many of them and they can express a range of different meanings, as illustrated in the table below. Conjunctions are sometimes called connectives, highlighting their connecting function. They are: • Additive (to add or to give an alternative): and, but, in addition; • Temporal (time links between events): then, finally, up to now, the following week; • Causal (one thing causes another): so, consequently, as a result, because; • Adversative (things contradict or require concessions): however, yet, although, on the contrary, nevertheless; • Continuatives (things follow on in steps): well, now, ok, right, anyway, after all. Grammar and representation Representation is about presenting seemingly natural pictures of the world and the people and things in it. There are many aspects of grammar that contribute to ideas about how the world is, but a particular focus here is on verbs. The unit covers transitivity, active and passive voice, modal verbs, the tense of verbs, and also what the effect can be of missing verbs out altogether. Both transitive and intransitive verbs are common in English. Transitive verbs are more common. A transitive verb is a verb that needs an object – something or someone affected by the verb – to complete its meaning. Some verbs can be transitive or intransitive, depending on the meaning: An hour elapsed before the match started (intransitive form) / She started a new job last week (transitive form). Transitivity is all about agency – the extent to which people and things are seen as active in the world. This may seem an abstract idea, but grammatical choices can construct some powerful messages about what seems ‘only natural’. A sentence doesn’t have to have a verb at all. Sentences without verbs are sometimes called minor sentences and you will see them in many places. A finite verb is thus a verb which tells you when something happened (past or present), how many were/are involved (singular or plural) and who the participants are (‘you’/‘we’/‘I’, 16 etc.). By contrast, when a non-finite -ing form is used the verb can be referring to any number, or tense, or first, second or third person. The present participles (‘ing’ forms) in particular convey a feeling of continuous action which could almost be timeless. The order of words and phrases in the sentences of texts is important. It is also important for the analysis of texts to identify those verbs which are active and those which are passive. The choice of active or passive voice enables us to place subjects and verbs in different positions and to give different emphases to the way meanings are made. Of course, the choice of the passive voice is not simply an alternative structural or another stylistic option. It may seem neutral, but it can be chosen for a purpose which is not neutral; the agent can be removed from a text in order to conceal who is responsible for an action. The agent is omitted if you do not know who it is or if you don’t want it to be known. Newspaper articles often use passive structures such as ‘it is thought that’ and ‘it is said that’ because they don’t want to reveal individual sources – or because they are offering conjecture and speculation rather than fact. 17 Conversational grammar There are also features of grammar that give a text a more informal or ‘spoken’ character. One of the most common features is ellipsis, an aspect where grammar can connect strongly with pragmatics. Ellipsis is a grammatical structure in which subjects and verbs are omitted because speakers can assume that their listeners (or their readers) know what is meant (the words and phrases in brackets below are the ellipted elements): Sounds good to me (It, That). Texting grammar Ellipsis is also common in speech. Examples of ellipsis here include gotta go/talk to you soon/must go. Even the abbreviation ttyl (talk to you later) is based on a grammatical ellipsis. Also interesting are a relative clause and a subordinate clause that do not seem to ‘belong’ to a main clause. These structures are frequent in conversational exchanges and maintain an interactive conversational feel as the content of the main clauses (while absent) is understood by the speakers and it is therefore almost redundant for them to be ‘spoken’. Creative grammar Grammar is a key element in how meanings are made in and through formal and informal spoken and written language, including in texts which are written but have some conversational features. The fact that there are rules of grammar also means that effects can be created when the rules are broken. When rules are broken, mistakes and misunderstandings can occur. But when we break or bend rules it can also be an opportunity for playing creatively with language. 20 Part III Building up - texts and contexts The dimensions of texts: place and time Two important dimensions of context are the physical setting for any piece of communication, and the time frame within which it takes place. In face to face encounters, a shared physical presence means that not everything needs to be spelled out: significant items and events in the environment can be indicated non-verbally or via ‘pointing’ (deictic) words such as ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’, ‘over there’. Deixis, which is Greek for ‘demonstrate’, is all about points of reference: deictic terms tell us to pay attention to certain aspects of the environment. This can include references to people as well as things: pronouns such as ‘he’ and ‘she’ can be effective short-cuts between those with shared knowledge. Of course, not all our interactions are face to face. Nowadays we spend large amounts of time in digital interactions of various kinds, all of which present us with contextual challenges. Participants created the idea of three-dimensional space by their choice of certain deictics – ‘here’, ‘there’ ‘in here’, ‘out there’. In a medium where one’s interlocutor is invisible, checking that there is someone ‘there’, wherever that location is, becomes a key communication skill. This is especially the case when a ‘chat’ tool is part of a company’s sales pitch. Advertising is all about placement, and placement is about the strategic use of space. In other words, some spaces are more fruitful than others. If we take the idea of advertising in its broadest sense, as promotional texts in general and not simply as texts that sell products (Goddard 1998), then artefacts such as carrier bags, coffee mugs and t-shirts provide mobile spaces for advertisers to colonise: our bodies carry their messages everywhere. At the same time, our phones and computers host advertising that is increasingly targeted to our own personal spaces. In literary texts, the idea of space is most familiar in terms of setting, or place. Because literary texts create fictional worlds, the deictics involved are termed ‘displaced’. The aspect of place, along with the time frame used for the action in the story, features within the broader concept of point of view – the overall perspective from which the narrative unfolds. Studying point of view would also normally include looking at whose voice appears to be addressing us: this area will be considered in detail in the next unit.The idea of physical space goes beyond the scenery of any imagined place, and takes in all the visual aspects of the story’s presentation, including how the characters look, their actions, and what is reported to us indirectly as well as what we are directly shown. The discussion of the literary texts above has focused on time as it is used internally, to structure the opening of narratives. However, there is also time in the plural – the times, or different eras, that writers work in. The same two aspects of time – internal and external – can be considered with reference to any text, not just to literature. With reference to external time, texts date; social values and practices can change, objects become obsolete, language use can become archaic and different languages can come to prominence or fade away. 21 There are also external aspects of time that are relevant. Mediated contexts (communication involving technologies of various kinds) are highly shaped by the affordances and limitations of the technologies at any one time. The participants behave as they do because of what the system allows them to do: in those examples, participants could not see each other, and there were no icons indicating keyboard activity. Language choices also change as a result of familiarity and experience. The era in which any text is produced is also subject to some large- scale factors where space and time are inextricably linked. However, the growth of global corporations using English everywhere they operate, the increased mobility of populations, and above all the expanded scope for communication facilitated by new technologies have accelerated the use of English in many further parts of the world, where English has gone from being a foreign language to being a kind of lingua franca – used as a common language between speakers who have different first languages. The existence of local varieties of English has implications for all speakers of English, particularly where interpreting language choices is concerned. Sometimes, however, texts rely so much on specific contexts of appearance that it is hard to achieve any kind of interpretation without some quite detailed knowledge of what was going on at the time the text was produced. Textual perspectives and point of view Reading and interpreting any text is a dynamic process. It is not simply a question of decoding what has been put there, as if it were a formula. People bring their own experiences to bear in interpreting a text, and this means that no two individuals will have exactly the same response. At the same time, there are aspects of texts that can be identified as part of a set of communicative strategies. In the end, interpretation is a process of negotiation between what is in the text and what people bring to it. This chapter focuses on this idea of negotiation, paying particular attention to the relationships between the negotiators. The term narrator describes the constructed persona that appears to be addressing us from the text. If a narrator is a constructed figure who appears to be addressing us from the text, a constructed figure who appears to be being addressed is termed a narratee. While you might be a reader of a text in the flesh-and-blood sense, a narratee is a fictionalised reader, constructed from all the assumptions that are made about who is being addressed – both explicit and implicit – by the text. 22