Advances in Written Text Analysis

Malcolm Coulthard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134867196
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This work provides an overview of a wide range of approaches to written text analysis. It includes both classic and specially commissioned papers by distinguished authors, which share a common linguistic framework. The pieces contain a variety of focuses from the patterning of paragraphs, sections or whole texts to the organization of clauses, individual expressions and single words, as well as a variety of text-types. The examples used range from pure science through social science, academic journals, weekly magazines and newspapers, to literary narratives. This collection forms the basis for an course on written text analysis that should be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students.

1 On analysing and evaluating written text

Malcolm Coulthard

The higher level of achievement is a contribution to the evaluation of the text.

(Halliday 1985: xv)

INTRODUCTION

All branches of linguistics are first and foremost descriptive and thus it is no surprise that text linguistics confines itself to describing what is, in other words to (selections from) already existing and usually published texts. The past thirty years have seen fascinating and lively debate about the nature and boundaries of linguistics, but one tenet has remained unchallenged: that linguistics is concerned solely with making descriptive and not prescriptive statements. While it is universally agreed that evaluating alternative grammars is a proper concern of linguistics, evaluating the comparative communicative success of two alternative sentences generated by any given grammar is not—despite the fact that both pure and applied linguists, in their role as teachers, are daily involved in telling students how to improve their linguistic skills.

There were, of course, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, important sociolinguistic reasons for emphasizing the validity of difference and denying the inherent inferiority of minority dialects. However, this battle has long since been won, following research into West-Indian English in Birmingham by Wight and Sinclair and into Black English in New York by Labov. Now the advances in descriptive linguistics of the last generation should give us the confidence to re-introduce evaluation, to admit what we have always secretly acknowledged, that some texts and some writers are better than others, and to try to account not simply for difference and for how existing texts mean, but also for quality and for why one textualization might mean more or better than another.

It is for this reason that I prefer to see any given text as just one of an indefinite number of possible texts, or rather possible textualizations, of the writer’s message—parts of this chapter, for instance, have passed through more than a dozen drafts, sometimes undergoing minor and sometimes major changes and, of course, not always changing for the better. It is evident that as writers we have no hesitation in evaluating our own texts, although as professional linguists we shy away from evaluating the texts of others—even in the field of translation studies, where alternative translations of major literary works are quite common, House (1977) is almost alone in investigating evaluation.

In this chapter I want to suggest that an investigation of the writer-reader communication process can enable us to derive some principles for evaluating texts and for preferring some textualizations over others.

One productive way forward is to focus on problematic texts—just as studies of aphasia and slips of the tongue have provided fruitful evidence for hypotheses about how language is organized in the brain, so a study of badly written text, or inadequate textualizations, may help us to understand better the nature of successful textualization.

I propose to use, for exemplificatory purposes, a short extract from an eight-page pamphlet entitled Holidays and Travel for Diabetics, published by the British Diabetic Association in 1977 and brought to me several years ago by a nurse who worked in a clinic for diabetics, with the complaint ‘our patients can’t understand this’, and the request ‘can you help me to re-write it?’ I propose to examine the first thirteen sentences of the text, up to the end of the first section entitled Food, but I have included the next section on Drink in order to show how the text continues.

Holidays and travel for diabetics

(1) The well-controlled diabetic can enjoy travelling and holidays abroad as much as anyone else, but he must go well prepared.

Food

(2) Most diabetics think that food will be a problem when travelling. (3) However, food in any country consists of the same basic ingredients. (4) Potatoes, rice and other starchy vegetables or cereals, and products containing flour and/or sugar, are the main source of carbohydrates. (5) Bread, in whatever form, has 15 grams of carbohydrate to the ounce. (6) Rice and pasta (macaroni, spaghetti, ravioli, etc.) are used instead of potatoes in many countries. (7) Before travelling you should buy the 10 gram Exchange List, available from the British Diabetic Association. (8) 10 gram portions of unfamiliar foods can then be weighed until you learn to judge them at a glance. (9) Protein foods are easily recognisable (meat, fish, eggs and poultry), and fats consist of butter, margarine, cooking fats and olive oil. (10) Overweight diabetics should cut fats to a minimum as they are very high in Calories or Joules. (11) A basic knowledge of cooking helps you to assess any dish so it is always worthwhile to study a cookery book. (12) Sweets and puddings should be avoided, but fresh fruit and plain ice cream or cheese and biscuits are easily calculated substitutes. (13) As ‘starters’ tomato juice, hors d’oeuvres and clear soup are all low in carbohydrates and Calories or Joules.

Drink

(14) All spirits are free of sugar and dry wine or sherry contains so little sugar that moderate amounts can be taken. (15) All beers, sweet cider, sweet wines and liqueurs (except diabetic preparations) contain some sugar. (16) Alcohol should be avoided by the overweight diabetic as it is high in Calories or Joules. (17) Fruit drinks and minerals usually contain high quantities of sugar, but Coca Cola is known to have 20 grams carbohydrate to the 6-ounce (150 ml) bottle—a useful form of topping up when swimming, dancing, etc. (18) Four ounces (100 ml) of fresh orange juice contains 10 grams carbohydrate. (19) Tea and coffee are, of course, free, but avoid Turkish coffee which is often served ready sweetened.

I have presented this text to many groups of professional and student linguists all over the world and the vast majority found it difficult to discover exactly what is intended or meant, although all agreed that the main effect is one of discouraging rather than encouraging foreign travel. In other words, the published textualization seems to fail on both the ideational and the interpersonal levels.

We have long been accustomed to thinking of ideational in terms of clauses but have no real way of approaching the ideational content of a whole text, except as a collection of the ideational contents of the constituent clauses. This, however, is not useful or even possible for my purposes, because what I am interested in exploring is the possible textualizations of the ideational, of which the one we have here is merely one sample realization. Looking at the communication process from the composer/writer’s point of view, we can see the ideational as pre-textual, although, unless one focuses on oneself, which is a flattering redefinition of the label ‘ideal speaker’, the only access one has to a writer’s ideational is through his/her text(ualization).

Thus, at this stage it is heuristically very useful to begin from an actual text, attempt to derive the ideational and then propose alternative and preferable textualizations. My task here, while not easy, is considerably simplified because the text is a mere 21-line extract from a much longer text, a justifiable isolable unit, because the lines comprise a section marked as such by the writer.

We have no automatic, standard or even agreed procedures for going from text to ideational content, but I must stress that the general points I am trying to make do not, in fact, depend on the correctness of my ideational analysis. What we need initially is a summary of the ideational content and I suggest that the message this author wants to put across and the message the diabetic/ reader wants to read is:

I assure you that: (1) Food abroad need not be a problem for the well-controlled diabetic.

For reasons we will now consider, (1) could not on its own be a possible textualization of the message.

IMAGINED READERS AND REAL READERS

Discussions of written communication are often presented in terms of a Writer communicating directly with his/her Readers by means of a written Text. In this model the text carries, transparently, the writer’s ideational content and any problems readers have with the text tend to be seen as deficiencies in the reader, deficiencies which are obviously compounded if the reader is not a native reader of the language of the text.

However, it is in fact an unhelpful formulation to see a writer as creating his/her text for those who actually read it. As I create this text I have no way of knowing anything about you, my current reader, nor of when or where you will read my text. Thus, I cannot create my text with you in mind, I cannot take into account what you already know and what you do not know, what you believe and what disbelieve.

The only strategy open to me, therefore, is to imagine a Reader, and to create my text for that imagined reader. Only in this way can I decide what I need to say and what I can assume, what parts of my argument must be spelled out in detail and what can be passed over quickly or omitted completely—a writer cannot begin at the beginning of everything. For example I work and write within a Hallidayan framework and thus I wrote above, without a second thought (and therefore without any overt reference to Halliday or any of his published works), about a textualization failing ‘on both the ideational and the interpersonal levels’. This would cause no problems for my Imagined Reader, to whom I have attributed a basic knowledge of Halliday; however, once my text is finished and published, it will be processed by Real Readers, like yourself, some of whom will be very familiar with Halliday and some of whom will know only the name. More generally, some of my Real Readers will be very similar, in terms of knowledge and background, to my Imagined Reader, while some will be very different. If you happen to know less about my topic than my Imagined Reader, you may find my text difficult, if you know more, you may find I have nothing new or of interest to say.

Significantly, it is the creation of the Imagined Reader which allows us as writers to keep the ideational within manageable limits—without a clear sense of audience, it is impossible to make the right decisions about what of the ideational to textualize. (It is, of course, an irony that we frequently complain about the quality of students’ writing but still all too often put them in the impossible situation of having to write essays and examination answers aimed at not a real known person but an imagined construct, the Ideal Marker, who is intelligent and generally well informed, but at the same time fortuitously ignorant of the central topic of the piece of work to be assessed.)

Since Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English (1976), we have been very conscious of the many ways in which texts are organized by means of, and analysable into, ‘given’ and ‘new’. However, what is less recognized is that any writer is faced with two major ideational/interpersonal decisions: first, what can s/he assume his/her intended audience (should) know and second, what of what they do know is it still useful or necessary to textualize. Thus, not only is there textually ‘given’ and ‘new’, there is also ideationally ‘given’ and ‘new’. Indeed, one of the significant contributions of Brazil (1985) was to demonstrate that speakers have available, in the intonati...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: ON ANALYSING AND EVALUATING WRITTEN TEXT
• 2: TRUST THE TEXT
• 3: SIGNALLING IN DISCOURSE: A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF A COMMON DISCOURSE PATTERN IN WRITTEN AND SPOKEN ENGLISH
• 4: CLAUSE RELATIONS AS INFORMATION STRUCTURE: TWO BASIC TEXT STRUCTURES IN ENGLISH
• 5: PREDICTIVE CATEGORIES IN EXPOSITORY TEXT
• 6: LABELLING DISCOURSE: AN ASPECT OF NOMINAL-GROUP LEXICAL COHESION
• 7: THE TEXT AND ITS MESSAGE
• 8: THE ANALYSIS OF FIXED EXPRESSIONS IN TEXT
• 9: THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE IN THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE, WITH REFERENCE TO CHARLES DARWIN’S THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
• 10: FRAMES OF REFERENCE: CONTEXTUAL MONITORING AND THE INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE DISCOURSE
• 11: INFERENCES IN DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION
• 12: NARRATIVES OF SCIENCE AND NATURE IN POPULARIZING MOLECULAR GENETICS
• 13: EVALUATION AND ORGANIZATION IN A SAMPLE OF WRITTEN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
• 14: GENRE ANALYSIS: AN APPROACH TO TEXT ANALYSIS FOR ESP
• 15: ON THEME, RHEME AND DISCOURSE GOALS
• 16: NEGATIVES IN WRITTEN TEXT
• 17: IT, THIS AND THAT
• 18: THE STRUCTURE OF NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS
• 19: ON REPORTING REPORTING: THE REPRESENTATION OF SPEECH IN FACTUAL AND FACTIONAL NARRATIVES
• REFERENCES