Ronald Carter and Angela Goddard, How to Analyse Texts, New York, Routledge 2016., Sintesi del corso di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Ronald Carter and Angela Goddard, How to Analyse Texts, New York, Routledge 2016. e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! PART I. How to analyse text CHAPTER 2........................................................................................................................................................2 CHAPTER 3........................................................................................................................................................3 CHAPTER 4 – THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB..................................................................................................3 CHAPTER 5........................................................................................................................................................5 CHAPTER 6........................................................................................................................................................5 CHAPTER 7. REPORTING...................................................................................................................................5 SECTION A: DRILLING DOWN – How texts are structured................................................................................6 CHAPTER 8: Definitions.....................................................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 9: Language as a semiotic system.....................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 10: What are the rules?....................................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 11: Signs and symbols.......................................................................................................................7 CHAPTER 12: Sound and symbols.....................................................................................................................7 CHAPTER 13: Speech, writing, and multimodality............................................................................................9 SECTION B: LEXICAL AND SEMANTIC LEVEL....................................................................................................10 CHAPTER 14: INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................................10 CHAPTER 15: FREQUENT WORDS...................................................................................................................10 CHAPTER 16: WORDS AND MORPHEMES.......................................................................................................11 CHAPTER 17: FORMING WORDS.....................................................................................................................12 17.2 SOME COMMON PREFIXES.....................................................................................................................12 Chapters: 18 – 19 - 20.....................................................................................................................................12 CHAPTER 21: Connotation and Collocation....................................................................................................14 CHAPTER 22: Words and metaphors..............................................................................................................14 CHAPTER 23: Lexical cohesion........................................................................................................................14 SECTION C – GRAMMATICAL LEVEL................................................................................................................14 CHAPTER 24: Introduction..............................................................................................................................14 CHAPTER 25: Grammar and cohesion.............................................................................................................15 CHAPTER 26: Grammar and representation...................................................................................................15 1 CHAPTER 27: Grammar, speech and language change...................................................................................16 CHAPTER 28: Grammar and politics................................................................................................................17 CHAPTER 29: Conversational grammar...........................................................................................................18 CHAPTER 30: Texting grammar.......................................................................................................................18 CHAPTER 31: Creative grammar.....................................................................................................................18 TEXT AND CONTEXTS..................................................................................................................................18 CHAPTER 32: The dimensions of texts, place and time...................................................................................18 CHAPTER 33 – TEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES AND POINT OF VIEW........................................................................19 CHAPTER 34: Texts as discourses - culture and gender...................................................................................19 CHAPTER 35: Dialogues – Genre and intersexuality........................................................................................20 CHAPTER 2 2.1 Recording Through recording it is possible to collect new sources of language use. For example, is the conversation is elusive (avoiding capture, imprendibile, is hard to grasp, sfuggente)it is possible to record some elements in a notebook or notemaking tool on a phone or on other devices. Today thanks to mobile digital technologies it is easier to record sound or voice but you should ask permission for recording. it is at this point that researches talk about ‘observer’s paradox’ as to say, if the speaker knows that he is recorded than he can alter what he really thinks in what the listeners what to hear. While recording or photographing individuals always requires some thinking about ethical behaviour, capturing images of inanimate objects is more straightforward. However, items in galleries, museum and private collections have their own rules and you need to abide by whatever terms are in operation (è necessario rispettare tutti I termini in vigore). SWEDISH TRAIN SEAT  The example showed in the book is a picture who represent a train seats covered with faux graffiti. The fabric has handwritten names of the Swedish royal family. Would it be ok to sit on the names of your country’s rulers? WATERSTONES  There is a poster on a famous UK bookshop chain really interesting forma a language perspective. The text is ‘you can take the X(child) out of the Y (bookshop) but you cannot take the Y(bookshop) out of the Y (child). It is possible to interact with this formula and understand that you can physically remove someone, but the context you’ve removed them from stays in their heart and minds. It can be applied in several contexts. GONE TANNING  it is an example of intertextuality. The phrase on a beachwear shop ‘Gone Tanning’ (abbronzato) refers to ‘Gone fishing’ (sono andato a pesca) so we can guess that the shop is closed at the moment. Using the phrase gone tanning the suggestion us that the author is at the beach. CI GUSTA  is an Italian food outlet specialized in ice cream production. It is a chain known all over the world. There is an intertextual reference to a ‘have a good day’ that becomes ‘have a food day’. 2 In real-time writing chat we can use both informal and formal style. It depends on the environment. If are in chat with our aunt using a webcam our register will be different than that used during an online exam where we need to use formal style to address to our teacher. 4.2.3 WORK ON PUBLIC VIEWS AND ATTITUDES If you are working on particular text about different cultural groups, you may choose to ask others their point of views in some ways: 1. Showing groups of people some material face to face and asking them how they respond to it 2. Setting up a questionnaire online or on paper 3. Blogging about the issue on your own or others’ sites. CHAPTER 5 Preparing the ground Reading and note-making skills. Reading helps you to acquire ideas and information, while note-making helps you to retain and revisit those ideas. Reading is always a good idea, but if your note-making is poor, then you may well forget a lot of the ideas you came across. There are different types of reading to produce successful text analysis. To understand the real purpose of a text you should read it several times, and asking yourself if there are different way for reading it. Whatever reading you do, you should keep a record of the resources you have consulted, like title, author of the book or article, publication details and page numbers if you are citing an author’s actual words (this is called referencing and there are different types of it). Another important point is to be concise, it means that your notes should contain the main concept that allow you to create a discourse that has sense. You could also summarize the concept. CHAPTER 6. ANALYSING. CHAPTER 7. REPORTING Writing about text – Students have often doubts about which styles of writing adopt in analysing texts. There are two main types of styles: 1. Former style, very scientific style (could seem artificial) 2. Personal style, but could be pointless The best way of writing is called statement style, where features are described and ideas are proposed PART II 5 SECTION A: DRILLING DOWN – How texts are structured. We are going to focus on aspects of text analysis. Graphological and phonological level. this section will increase your awareness of how signs and sounds helps you to shape meaning in texts. CHAPTER 8: Definitions Graphology: it refers to the visual aspects of language, for this reason it is associated with writing than with speech. The real meaning of the term within language study refers to all the aspects of visual appearance that affect how we interpret written communication. Phonology: it is 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 of phonemes, or individual sounds. This might seem an abstract area, phonology helps us to understand some significant aspects of language learning and to analyse how representation and stereotyping work. 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. CHAPTER 9: 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, or signs take their overall meaning from how they are combined with other elements (analogy of the traffic lights: the colour green amber and red has sense only if they are considered in the whole system and order of the traffic light, and this happens with the language). Written letters of a language are signs which have to be in a certain order to make sense. Ferdinand de Saussure coined the term “semiology” that refers to the “science of the science”. He believed that should be important to develop theories bout how others signing system work. Semiotics has strong connections with semantics and pragmatics. There are connections in semantics in the sense of 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. In constructing text, It is important, in terms of pragmatic considerations to be aware about the level of acceptable directness or levels of required indirectness. CHAPTER 10: What are the rules? Each society has its own rules which might produce or constraint certain kinds of language (for example, the rule of queuing in UK culture, that If it is broken could produce same non-verbal 6 communication or verbal communication, design to be overheard by the rule breaker). The rules are not static because each culture has its own. CHAPTER 11: Signs and symbols Signs are divided into two major categories, iconic signs and symbolic signs. 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. An iconic sign tries to be a direct picture of what it refers to for instance the DOVE (colomba) it is a clearly symbol of PEACE (p.49). It could be difficult to categorise simply as iconic or symbolic signs because they can be also a mixture of the 2 approaches. Signs are extremely culturally specific and they also relies heavily on the context of its siting. An example (p.51) is the picture of the trespasser that is iconic too. It is forbidden the passage for trespasser. But the gavel (martelletto) is a symbolic presence of the whole process of law enforcement. The relationship between the gavel and the law is called metonymic meaning that the gavel is a small part of the larger scene it refers to. Graphology is not simply about pictures in the sense of photograph, written language itself can also be used to produced pictures. It is the case of Chinese characters that are ideograph, a written symbol stands for the whole idea. Digital communication too has found a way to connect writing with picture through the combination of punctuation : - )  😊 called ‘Emoji’ that appeared for the first time in 1990s in Japan. Each kind of mood is represented through an emoji in written communication, non-verbal. CHAPTER 12: Sound and symbols. Sound can be represented through IPA International Phonetic alphabet that shows us how to pronounce a sound, independently from the language. It is the same for all the languages. The IPA covers the sound of all the world’s known languages. Some symbols are well known because they come from the Roman Alphabet. Received pronunciation (RP): it is an accent that historically belongs to the educated people from privileged background. If the speaker has different accent from RP their list of phonemes (termed phoneme inventory) might well be different from the opposite. There are 44 sound in English but only 26 letters that we can use to represent them. We can combine letters to produce different sounds. 12.1 THE VOCAL TRACT. Speech sounds are produced in the vocal tract, using air pushed out from the lungs. Different speech sound are made by changing the shape of the vocal tract. This can be done by moving the lips and and tongue to touch different parts of the vocal tract. (PLACE OF ARTIULATION). 12.2 PLOSIVES  p b, t d, k g ʧʤ These sounds are all explosions; they are created by obstructing the flow of air bringing parts of the mouth together, then letting go suddenly. 7  Friend, acquaintances, other connections  Material imposed by site owner – for example, advertising Types of structure:  Written text  Graphics, including images  Sound  Video  Link SECTION B: LEXICAL AND SEMANTIC LEVEL CHAPTER 14: INTRODUCTION The focus of this chapter will be the words. Patterns of vocabulary are a key element in the way language is organised and in the way meaning are made. CHAPTER 15: FREQUENT WORDS Between the most 40 famous frequent words used in English there are: THE, TO, AND, OF, A, IN, WAS, IT, I, HE, THAT, SHE, FOR, ON…they are vital for everyday communication and provide the glue that holds language together. 15.1 REFERENCE FUNCTION Reference means pointing things out (observe, remark on), like naming the words around us. 15.2 ‘A’ AND ‘THE’ They are articles, ‘a’ is indefinite articles which refers to a no specific term, while ‘the’ is definite that refers to a specific term. Advertising, promotional texts, books, newspaper and magazine titles use ‘the’ to suggest the authority that comes with the idea of being ‘the one and only’. The word ‘a’ suggest repeated or common occurrences as well as single item. 15.3 PRONOUN REFERENCE Pronouns allow us to refer easily to people, by replacing their names with items that stand in their places. There are: personal pronoun (I You He/She/It..) and pronoun that are the object in a sentence. Proprieties: 1. Identify participants 10 2. Specify both their number (single person or a group) 3. Specify the gender 4. Provide a sense of intimacy 15.4 DEICTICS ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘there’ 15.5 TIME Further words or parts of words on the corpus list help us to understand which time period is being referred to. 15.6 CONJUNCTION Linking elements together. 15.7 LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL WORDS. Some of the most famous words used may be tiny and seem insignificant, but they have a powerful meaning. If you put together these words they make no sense. A language needs grammatical words and lexical words. The most common English words listened before are almost all grammatical words, like words such as football, player, home are lexical words because they carry a meaning. The grammatical words provide more or less the structures within which the lexical words make their messages. CHAPTER 16: WORDS AND MORPHEMES. 16.1 WHAT IS A MORPHEME? Help to structure and convey the meanings. These units are called morphemes and the study of the structure of words is called morphology. A morpheme is a single unit which composes words, it has a meaning. 16.2 HOW MANY MORPHEMES CAN THERE BE? Words may be made up of one or more morphemes. For example the word inexpensive consist of 3 morphemes IN – EXPENS – IVE. 16.3 DIFFERENT CLASSES OF MORPHEME There are two main classes of morpheme. 1. Free morphemes: independent and free-standing as words 2. Bound morphemes: which cannot stand on their own and their meaning depends on attaching a free morpheme. 11 Bound morphemes have two functions: one is to act as a grammatical marker, giving information about number, verb tense and other grammatical functions; these are inflectional morphemes. The second function is to form new words that are called derivational morphemes. CHAPTER 17: FORMING WORDS. The process whose aim is to create words is called ‘affixation’ which involves the addition of prefixes and suffixes 17.1 SOME COMMON SUFFIXES. -ism, -dom  to form noun -er, or,  to describe people who do things -en, -ify  to form verbs -able  to form adjectives -ly, -ily  to form adjectives 17.2 SOME COMMON PREFIXES Prefixes usually have meaning. Mono- = one ; multi- = many ; post = after ; un- = not ; re- = again Compounding refers to the process by which two or more existing words (free morphemes) are combined to form new words. Conversion is a process by which different words are changed from one class to another. Words can also be created by other means such as abbreviations, blends, acronyms and initialism. Abbreviations : Ad= advertisement Blends: Blog = web+log ; smog= smoke+fog ; Acronyms (initials said as words): NATO = North Atlantic Treaty Organization Initialism (said as letters): SMS= short message service Some terms are a mixture of the two: CD – ROM Chapters: 18 – 19 - 20 Denotation and Connotation The word “denotation” refers to the real meaning that a word has. It is the meaning that it can be found on a dictionary. It represents the explicit or referential meaning of a sign. 12 CHAPTER 25: Grammar and cohesion Grammar is an important aspect of cohesion, it enables you not only to understand which sentence went with which but also which order the senteces should occur. Lexical and semantic aspects of cohesion comprehend: the repetition of words, variation within a word family, the use of a semantic field. All this elements create the ‘texture’. Important aspects of grammatical cohesion are: conjunctions and connectives. 25.1 Conjunctions Could be:  Additive (to add or to give an alternative)  Temporal (time links between events)  Causal (one thing cause another)  Adversative (thing contradict or require concessions)  Continuatives (things follow on in steps) CHAPTER 26: Grammar and representation. Grammar is important in constructing representations. The focus is on verbs and their characteristics: transitivity, active and passive voice, modal verbs, the tense of verbs, what the effect can be of missing verbs out altogether. 26.1 Transitivity Transitive and intransitive verbs are both common in English. A transitive verb is a verb that needs to be followed by an object to have sense. For instance the verb love in the phrase “Rabbits love carrots” has no sense if it was in his own without an object. An intransitive verb is the contrary: it can stand on his own because it has sense. She sneezed (starnutire). Some verbs can be transitive or intransitive, depending on the meaning, like the verb start. 26.2 Look! No Verbs There some kind of clauses called minor sentences because they miss the verb. An example should be the menus of the bar, restaurant…because it show to the costumers the products offered by the bar, restaurant…but when a clause has a verb this last conveys a sense of completed action. 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’ etc..). By contrast, 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 participle (‘ing’ forms) in particular, convey a feeling of continuous action which could almost be timeless. 26.3 Tense and word order 15 There is a sentence in this text which contain an inverted words order: An hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s In Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. The red part indicates the location, but usually the normal word order is: subject + main verb + rest of sentence…moreover the simple present verb gives the idea of permanence to the reader. The verb sits should be in the past tense. 26.4 active and passive voice It is important for the analysis of texts to identify those verbs which are active and those which are passive. The choice of passive or active voice enable us to place subjects and verbs in different positions and to give different emphases to the way meanings are made. The active voice shows that a subject takes an action that has an effect on an object.  They sold their apartment last year => the effect turns on the apartment, not on the subj. Have a look on the structure of the passive voice: The apartment was sold by them last year. The object of the active sentence now has becoming the subject. The verb has changed form too and we have also added the preposition ‘by’ that indicates the agent. CHAPTER 27: Grammar, speech and language change. Research has shown up the fact that speakers often use different structures from those that are used in writing, and it has also become clear that many of the labels we have traditionally used to aspects of grammar don’t really fit with how things work in speech. For instance, the word sentence is just used in writing while in speaking is more used the term utterance. There are also multimodal interactions in the case of online chat, or using a webcam, this kind is neither speech, neither writing. 27.1 Frequency list THE – TO – AND – OF – A – IN – WAS – IT – I – HE – THAT – SHE – FOR – ON – HER – YOU – IS – WITH – HIS – HAD – AS – AT – BUT – BE – HAVE – FROM – NOT – THEY – BY – THIS – ARE – WERE – ALL – HIM – UP – AN – SAID – THERE – ONE – BEEN. 16 27.2 Small words, big changes. The most frequent English words are all small words, they are monosyllables and they do not have more than 4 letters. 27.2.1 SO it is commonly used with a negative adjective like ‘I was so unhappy…’ or to emphasize verbs, noun, or adverb phrases like ‘I was so excited’ or is can be used as a discourse marker to change topic in a conversation: ‘ so, it’s now 5 o’clock. Are we going out for dinner or staying in? 27.2.2 HOW It is traditionally used in exclamations – How smart you look today! – How is followed by the structure used for statements, subject+verb. 27.2.3 LIKE It is used to focus attention by giving or requesting an example. ‘like this, like that…’ A common structure in English conversation is ‘like what’ which means ‘such as’. Like can be placed also at the end of a sentence, in order to qualify a preceding statement. CHAPTER 28: Grammar and politics. 28.1 Critical language awareness CDA = critical discourse analysis  look at the way transitive and intransitive verbs could be used to indicate particular gender roles and thus reveal particular ways of seeing the world. Nominalization is an important feature of language to be attentive to at the interface between grammar and ideology. 28.2 Nominalization It is the process whose aim is noun formation 28.4 The language of politics. The example in the book is Obama’s political speech ‘YES, WE CAN’. When we want to make an analysis of a political speech we should focus on:  Abstract nouns and nominalization  words such as hope, struggle and progress are used as a noun and not as verb. The use of nominalized form means that Obama doesn’t need to clarify who or what was struggled against. the nouns are abstract but are also sometimes used as if they were animate. It gives a sense of dynamism.  Voice  Active and Passive voices are both used. Passive voice is used when the powerful forces are unnamed (when the agent misses) and the active one when referring to the liberation from these forces(unnamed). ex. Passive voice: We were told that we can’t (the question should be: ‘by whom??’ That indicates the agent) – A democracy was saved (BY WHOM?).  Nouns plus postmodifying structure  postmodifying structure adds information to the nouns (more formal and detached overview). The formality is avoided through the use of singular and plural personal pronouns. Obama addresses directly to the crowd.  Personal pronouns  the repetition of Yes, we can suggest a common purpose, including everyone in the vision of change for a better future. 17 Social groups identities can be suggested in a number of different ways. Sometimes a set of practices or characteristics associated with a group can be used as part of a text’s message. For instance, texts can be addressed to a specific social class (upper or low) or not. The example in the book at page 206 ‘Afternoon Tea’, it is an invitation just for that part of a society that uses to take a meal with sandwiches, cakes and tea around 3.00 o’ clock p.m. 34.2 Gender discourses: what are ‘he’ and ‘she’ like? Discourses are powerful in constructing our notion of reality, ‘how things are’. Language and gender aren’t just about women or about how women and men interact on the pages of romantic fiction aimed at female reader. Even in such fictions, although the stereotyping of women is more obvious, there are powerful constructions of masculinity too. Men are seen as powerful, assertive, sexually expert and dominant. Regardless of the genre being analysed, discourses of gender are also intertwined with those of sexuality ; idealised depictions of both men and women are often ‘heteronormative’ where the figures involved are assumed to be heterosexual. CHAPTER 35: Dialogues – Genre and intersexuality 35.1 What is a genre? The term ‘genre’ refers to a system based on types of text and not necessarily on the topic or ideas contained within it. For instance, the term ‘magazines’ constitute a genre. Genres are different from discourses because these lasts can be composed of many genres. Genres can be spoken, written or a mixture of both and their name describe the different types of communication that are in circulation at any one time within a society, and these labels tend to be associated with a particular function or goal. Genres are not fixed, they change through time like the term ‘social media’ that has been invented in the last decades. 35.2 Intertextuality A text is a particular genre produced by one person. Text cannot be ‘pure’ and it means that they could not belong just to one category because it can be informative and persuasive as well. This is called intertextuality. This can be a useful strategy to harness the power of other texts and achieve a connection with particular target groups. At page 213 the example of intertextuality consist on using the style of the flight departure for advertising shopping facilities. A checklist for text analysis. FIRST QUESTIONS ABOUT A TEXT  What do you notice?  How does the text affect you?  Where did the text come from? 20  What type of text is it? What is the text for?  How do you initially interpret the text? What is your first response to it? TEXT, TEXTURE AND IMAGE  What is the initial impact made by the shape and texture of text on the page: front size? Pictures and images?...  What is the background/foreground?  What is not in the text that might be expected? VOCABULARY, GRAMMAR AND DISCOURSE. Vocabulary  What is the balance of lexical and grammatical words?  Are the words and phrases specialised in general? If specialised, what semantic field is being used and why?  What connotations are suggested by the words? Are the meanings more literal, indirect or pragmatic in meaning?  What kinds of patterns are created by the words?  Are there synonyms, antonyms, metaphors, repetitions…are any patterns broken?  What is the nature of cohesion (lexical and grammatical) made in the text? Grammar  What is the effect of grammatical words? Look for smaller grammatical words (articles, pronouns…)  What kind of deictic expression are there? Are they temporal, spatial or social?  How many adjectives are used and what point of view do they convey?  What kinds of nouns are used? (abstract, concrete)  What tenses are used? (active or passive – short/longs sentences – finite or non-finite)  Kinds of verb used (action verbs – transitive/intransitive – modal verb/modal expression)  Are there mostly statements / imperatives / questions?  Does the text consist of many clauses?  Level of formality  Are there any expected feature of grammar that are not in the text? Discourse  To what extent are words, phrases and grammatical structures used to reveal and conceal ideologies?  What is the point of view of the text? 21  Are there any intertextual references? SOUND, SPEECH AND DIALOGUES.  How many speakers are there? What are the speakers using the language for?  Is the talk spontaneous or planned?  who initiates speaking turns,?  Are there any interruptions, overlaps or pauses in the exchanges?  Are there any obvious paralinguistic features?  What are the most noticeable sound patterns?  How is sound represented on the written page? DIGITAL TEXT  What are the affordances and limitations of the communication tool?  In the text interactive and interpersonal or more individual or corporate one-way product?  How do the different possible modes of communication relate to each other?  Are there any aspects of the environment that resemble the spoken context and if so, which?  Are the aspects of the text that are nothing like former modes of communication? 22