Text Structure

8 Key excerpts on "Text Structure"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  On Grammar

  Volume 1

  • M.A.K. Halliday(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  But it is difficult to specify Text Structures in a way which represents the text simply as a higher-rank grammatical constituent; the configurations are different in kind, and the relationship to the wording is both indirect and complex. Functional elements of Text Structure are not translatable into strings of clauses. A text is therefore not “like” a clause in the way that a clause is like a word or a syllable like a phoneme. But by the same token, just because clause and text differ on two dimensions, both rank (size level) and exponence (stratal level), there can exist between them a relation of another kind: an analogic or metaphorical similarity. A clause stands as a kind of metaphor for a text. In this paper I shall refer to some well-known properties of a text, and then, drawing on some recent text-linguistic studies in a systemic-functional framework, try to show that these are paralleled in significant ways by properties of a clause that are in some sense (not always the same sense) analogous. The textual properties to be considered are the following: 1. A text has structure. 2. A text has coherence. 3. A text has function. 4. A text has development. 5. A text has character. 1.1.1 A text has structure For at least some registers, perhaps all, it is possible to state the structure of a text as a configuration of functions (Hasan 1979). A generalized structural representation is likely to include some elements that are obligatory and others that are optional; and the sequence in which the elements occur is likely to be partly determined and partly variable. Most of the actual formulations of Text Structure that have been put forward seem to relate to one broad genre, that of narrative. The original source of inspiration for these was Propp’s theory of the folk tale. The structure of traditional oral narrative has been investigated in detail within tagmemic and stratificational frameworks, on foundations provided by Longacre and Gleason.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Expressibility and the Problem of Efficient Text Planning

  • Marie Meteer(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  In the discussion in §4.2, I focused on the capacity of Text Structure for constraining decision making and capturing distinctions; in this section, I focus on its actual use in the derivation of an utterance. I first provide a definition of Text Structure 50 and then describe its representation in Spokesman's Text Planner. I look at what information is contained in a Text Structure node, then at what kinds of objects can fill the contents field of a node, and finally at the structural relations in a tree of nodes 4 8 Halliday, 1985, p. 198. 4 9 Ibid. 5 0 Note that I do not attempt a formal definition. I agree with the text linguist Beaugrande that Formalism should not be undertaken too early. Unwieldy constructs borrowed from mathematics and logic are out of place in domains where the basic concepts are still highly The Text Structure 79 and what kinds of subtrees can be formed. In Chapter Five, we will look at how Spokesman constructs the Text Structure and uses it in its decision making. 4.3.1 Definition of Text Structure Text Structure is a tree in which each node represents a constituent in the utterance being planned. Each node is a tuple containing the following: • the information being expressed. This is called the contents of the node. It is either an application program object or a Text Structure Object with a semantic category and (when applicable) a lexical item, depending on the moment in the derivation; • the structural relations to its parent and to its children; • a backpointer to the object in the application program that the constituent expresses. (This need not be a single object in the application, but could be some part of an object or a composite of objects.) 4.3.2 Text Structure nodes Text Structure nodes carry a great deal of information in them about the constituents they dominate, such as the information the constituent expresses and the semantic category of its expression.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  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.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Text and Discourse Constitution

  Empirical Aspects, Theoretical Approaches

  • János S. Petöfi(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  In this way the linguistic and literary criticism interest in this important section of linguistic reality is recovered. 3.1. We must start from the well-known differentiation between text surface structure and text deep structure in order to locate the different sections of the structuration of text. Starting from the fruitful notional dichotomy offered by transformational-generative grammar, we have been able to distinguish between linear text manifestation and text basis in a model like Petöfi's Text-Structure World-Structure Theory (1973; 1975; 1979a). Elsewhere the Compositional Structure: Macrostructures 183 difference is established, in van Dijk's model between text microstructure and text macrostructure (1972: 6, 17; 1976: 72 ff.). A common characteristic of the text basis and of macrostructure is that both, each in its corresponding model, constitute a global textual plan with a transformational part. The organization of the text as a global linguistic product is located in the domain of the above-mentioned global textual plan (Garcia-Berrio, 1979b: 24; 1979c: 56) and therefore in the text basis or in macrostructure. The text macrostructure (Bierwisch, 1970:112-113; van Dijk, 1972:130ff.; 1977a: 130 ff.; 1977b; 1980a: 41 ff.; 1980b: 43 ff.; Ballmer, 1976) or text deep structure is the part of a text formed by the underlying relationships of the linguistic product which go beyond the sentential domain. The text microstructure is the ensemble formed by the surface structures of the sentences of a text and by the underlying structures of these sentences (van Dijk, 1972: 6, 17). In accordance with the framework of rhetorical operations, macrostructure is the result of inventio and of dispositio, while microstructure is the result of elocutio.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Subject-oriented Texts

  Languages for Special Purposes and Text Theory

  • Hartmut Schröder(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  In this paper we set out to deal with three major aspects of our work. In § 2 we will review some historical and theoretical aspects of text linguistic investigations of LSP-texts. § 3 will be devoted to a brief outline of our own approach to the analysis of LSP-texts. In this section we will also present the aims and hypotheses which are the bases of the project work. Finally, in § 4 some preliminary results of our investigations into the linguistic structure and communicative function of introductions and conclusions in German and Anglo-American scientific journals will be presented. These findings tend to support our view that intercultural differences in Text Structure can in some cases be sufficiently great as to cause problems for non-native language users. 2. Historical and theoretical aspects 2.1. Linguistic contrasts at text level In the past, contrastive investigations concentrated for the most part on microlinguistics, that is, on the internal and structural dimensions of language, 1 0 4 C. Gnutzmann, Η. Oldenburg and only rarely included macrolinguistic phenomena in their analyses. This appears to be mainly due to the fact that studies on the linguistic structure and communicative functions of texts, as opposed to studies on smaller units of discourse such as sentences, only seriously began in the 1970's as a result of a shift of focus from a system-linguistic to a communicative perspective (cf. Helbig 1986, 13 — 18). However, even today, more than ten years after the analysis of language-in-use (and thus also of texts) became one of the main occupations of linguists all over the world, there is no generally agreed approach to the investigation of Text Structures. Indeed, most researchers cannot even agree on what constitutes a text and how texts can be separated from non-texts.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Linguistic Structures in Scientific Texts

  • Myrna Gopnik(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  3 SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES IN TEXTS 1.0 DEFINITION OF CRITERIA FOR STRUCTURE In this chapter we will discuss certain patterns of syntactic struc-tures which appeared in the scientific texts with which we were dealing, and, since we assume our sample to be a representative sample, which are typical patterns of scientific texts. There are three different aspects of syntactic patterns which could be studied. The first of these is a study of which transformations actually did occur in the empirical data, but since any sentence which is gram-matical may appear in some text, every structure found in any sentence must occur in some text. From the point of view of designing real programs to handle real texts, however, such a study would not be without its value. It may be that certain transformations which are necessary for a total grammar of English may not occur in scientific texts, and may therefore not be necessary for an adequate grammar of scientific English. Eliminat-ing such superfluous transformations would simplify the grammar and perhaps eliminate some ambiguous structures. However we will not deal here with any such data. A second aspect of the concept of syntactic patterns in texts is the influence such structures have on one another. We have discuss-ed certain instances of such intersentential dependencies in the previous chapter and will discuss certain other such dependencies in this chapter. However, the explication and resolution of this type of dependency is only a necessary preliminary to the real study. In order to describe the general syntactic patterns of texts SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES IN TEXTS 47 it is first necessary to assign a syntactic description to each of the texts individually.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Contrastive Analysis in Language

  Identifying Linguistic Units of Comparison

  • D. Willems, B. Defrancq, T. Colleman, D. Noël, D. Willems, B. Defrancq, T. Colleman, D. Noël(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Some pages turn out to be highly hierarchically organized; others are relatively flat and consist of independent layout units. The hier- archical layout structure for the English page is shown in Figure 10.6(a). This states, for example, that the three chunks realized by itemized lists of various kinds are all of a similar status from the perspective of the lay- out and could be moved relatively freely with respect to one another; Itemized list Figure 10.5 Example English instructional text segmented into layout (abridged) John Bateman and Judy Delin 255 they must all, however, be maintained as a coherent block in its own right, thereby defining the ‘body’ of the page. Finally, for present purposes, we also carry out a rhetorical structure analysis following the criteria and methodology developed for RST by Mann and Thompson (1988) and many others since. A rhetorical struc- ture according to this view claims that each coherent text can be decom- posed into a single hierarchical arrangement of text ‘spans’. Spans are related by a specified set of rhetorical relations which typically impose a relative importance to the spans related. One of the spans is singled out as being more central for the achievement of that segment’s discourse purpose (the nucleus), the others play a supportive role (the satellites). A rhetorical analysis of the English instruction page content is shown in Figure 10.6(b). Nuclei are represented by vertical lines, text spans by horizontal lines, and rhetorical relations by labelled arcs between spans. The analysis here claims that the main purpose of the text fragment is to give information about how to record. This informa- tion is thus an enablement of the user’s intended recording action. That enablement is itself decomposed into the central information concern- ing basic recording techniques, elaborated with some extra information about recording while watching other programmes.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Language in Education

  Social Implications

  • Rita Elaine Silver, Soe Marlar Lwin(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  2 What Is the Structure of Language? Lubna Alsagoff and Ho Chee Lick INTRODUCTION Language is a semiotic system. By this we mean that it is a set of signs used to convey meaning. There are many semiotic systems that we encounter in our everyday lives, for example, traffic lights signal information to us through changes in lights. Language differs from these other semiotic systems in its complexity. In particular, the ‘design features’ of human language (see Chapter 1) enable it to serve as a highly versatile means of communication in a wide range of contexts. For example, language allows us to convey information about things that happened in the past, and the number of sentences that users of a language can produce, and comprehend, is vast if not infinite! Although the range of language signs is so vast, all of these signs, at the lowest level, are made up of combinations from an inventory of speech sounds (or if we think about writing, it can be seen as being composed of symbols that represent sound). These sounds combine to form words. For example, the word pits consists of four sounds: /p/, / ɪ /, /t/ and /s/. We study the sounds of a language in the branch of linguistics known as phonetics. LANGUAGE IN EDUCATION 20 If we examine the word pits more closely, we find that it is in fact composed of two different parts: pit and s . These parts are units of meaning known as morphemes, and we study the way in which morphemes combine to form words in a branch of linguistics known as morphology. A closely related field of study is syntax, which studies the way words combine to form sentences. Together, the sub-disciplines of morphology and syntax are referred to as grammar. Finally, in any study of the structure of language, we examine how words convey meaning either by themselves or when combined to form phrases and sentences – this is the branch of linguistics known as semantics.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book