Text Structure Analysis

9 Key excerpts on "Text Structure Analysis"

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  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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  Text Linguistics of Qur'anic Discourse

  An Analysis

  • Hussein Abdul-Raof(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Text linguistics emerged during the 1970s as a new discipline but has remained a branch of mainstream linguistics. It is concerned with the description and analysis of macro spoken and written texts. In other words, the text is the major and largest linguistic sign/unit which is worthy of analysis rather than its constituent single words, phrases, or sentences. Text linguistics studies the communicative relationship through texts between the text producer (writer/speaker) and the text receiver (reader/hearer). It studies the communicative employment of cohesive devices in the construction of a given text. Text linguistics is concerned with the flow of information intra-sententially (within the same sentence) and inter-sententially (among different sentences) by looking at text linguistic features of the text like coherence, cohesion, the organization of old/given/known (unmarked) information and new/unknown (marked) information which are constituents of the text structure. In text linguistics, we focus on the linguistic processes of text cohesion and text coherence.

  In text linguistics, the text is a communication system and has a communication function. In the view of Dirven and Vespoor (2004:180), text linguistics is concerned with the study of how a writer/speaker and a reader/hearer manage to communicate through texts. In other words, how the text producer and the text receiver can go beyond the text, i.e., how they effectively employ cohesive devices (adawāt al-rabṭ), such as (wa – and), (bisabab – because), (thumma – then), and (walākin – but), in order to construct sentential and paragraph relations within a given text.

  Text linguistics is different from traditional structural linguistics. The latter focuses on sentence grammar, i.e., sentence structure, and is concerned primarily with the sentence as the largest linguistic unit in linguistic analysis. However, text linguistics views the sentence as a micro unit of language and is concerned with the text structure and textuality. Linguistic analysis should be carried out at the macro level, the text, and the sentence is only a part of the macro text.

  For more details, see Dressler (1978:21); Trask (1997:219); Beaugrande and Dressler (1981:ii, 3); Crystal (2003:234–235, 462); and Hatim and Munday (2004:350).

  1.3 Major notions in text linguistics

  The major notions in text linguistics include: text, subtext, context of situation, texture, cohesive ties, standards of textuality, and macro functions of text (field, tenor, and mode), and text types. These are discussed in what follows.

  1.3.1 Text

  The word ‘text’ is derived from the Latin verb (texere) meaning to weave, to compose, or to contrive. In other words, the words are woven together in a text. A text enjoys inherent lexicogrammatical and stylistic hallmarks which reflect the social and cultural context in which a specific text occurs. A text should constitute a congruent discourse (kalām mutalā’im). A text should be well formed (faṣīḥ) and be free from rhetorical deficiency (c uyūb balāghiyyah) and sluggish sentences (jumal mutanāfirah). A text should also enjoy continuity and progression. On the lexical, grammatical, and stylistic levels, the text is influenced by its social event. Thus, the context of situation is the womb of the text. On the stylistic level, the text should avoid distasteful style and unnaturalness (c

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  Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament

  Studies in Tools, Methods, and Practice

  • Stanley E. Porter(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Baker Academic

    (Publisher)

  11 As a result, some linguists wish to talk about levels above the sentence, even if those levels are not said to have grammatical or syntactical structure. Other linguists, recognizing units beyond the sentence, wish to see this level or these levels as having structure, almost as if they have the same kind of syntax as a sentence does (supersentences, with reference to supersentential syntax). One can see that these differing perspectives have implications. The former approach recognizes something but categorizes it in such a way that makes description inherently problematic. This inevitably has a stultifying effect upon linguistic exploration, since research naturally focuses on those levels that can be more easily talked about and exemplified. The latter approach optimistically directs its attention to supersentential elements but is perpetually frustrated by the fact that one cannot clearly describe the structural features of those units. They may be there, but we cannot identify them in the same way that we can identify, for example, the subject of a clause.

  What Is a Text?

  One of the most important questions related to discourse analysis is what it means for a text to be a text.12 After all, discourse analysis is built on the paired assumptions that there are such things as texts and that they merit analysis as wholes. It is only natural that discourse analysis should explore why these two presuppositions are valid. In this respect, one of the first issues to be confronted is the role of coherence. Coherence entails that a text displays a certain degree of intellectual and ideational intelligibility. When the speech of those with various mental diseases is analyzed, however, there does not appear to be coherence. (Of course, this principle applies more broadly. Undergraduate papers, for example, often lack coherence.) In response to the issue of coherence, some discourse analysts have opted to study cohesion.13 Cohesion entails that there are various features of texts that hold them together. These linguistic features may not consistently give rise to coherence, but they are quantifiable, and they do play a role in making a text a text. Almost any element of the text can be seen to have cohesive properties. Obvious elements include the use of conjunctions, the presence of participant chains, the repeated use of lexis from certain semantic domains, and the deployment of various morphologically based devices, such as tense-forms, voice-forms, and mood-forms. Every one of these features (and many more besides) plays a role in creating what is called a text. Unfortunately, the area of textuality is woefully underexplored in New Testament studies. We often inherit genres or literary types from previous study—for example, Gospel or epistle—and then we read the characteristics of those genres into a given instance of text. We assume a level of connectedness on the basis of macrostructure, rather than attempting to describe the way in which a particular text is constructed as a text.14

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  Text, Context, Pretext

  Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis

  • H. G. Widdowson(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Although Eng-lish is specifically mentioned here, the same would presumably apply to any language. Perhaps the first thing to be clear about is that the aim of the grammar so formulated is to account for text as a linguistic unit in its own right, to explain it as such and not simply to use it to exemplify the 18 Text and grammar occurrence of other structural units, like clauses or phrases. The purpose, it would appear, is not therefore to show how different grammatical features simply show up in stretches of language, but how they operate to form larger units of meaning. As Halliday says: ‘The grammar, then, is at once both a grammar of the system and a grammar of the text’ (Halliday 1994:xxii). One might reasonably infer from this statement that text analysis is taken as a straightforward matter of applying the categories of the grammar. But only, it would appear, up to a point. Halliday explains that analysis works on two levels: One is a contribution to the understanding of the text: the linguistic analysis enables one to show how, and why, the text means what it does. In the process, there are likely to be revealed multiple meanings, alternatives, ambi-guities, metaphors and so on. This is the lower of the two levels; it is one that should always be attainable provided the analysis is such as to relate the text to general features of the language – provided it is based on the grammar in other words. At this level, then, application of grammatical categories reveals the proper-ties of the text, not only, we should notice, how it is constructed, but what it means. That is to say, the meaning is internally in the text, and under-standing derives directly from analysis. Analysis, it would seem, does not just contribute to, but actually constitutes understanding. Certainly there is no mention here of where any other contribution might come from.

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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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  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.

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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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  Expressibility and the Problem of Efficient Text Planning

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

    (Publisher)

  Work in this area is usually termed discourse structure or text structure (which contrasts with my usage of the term, as discussed in §2.1.3.4) and the minimal units are generally clause-sized or larger. Few researchers have attempted to look at constituency below the level of the sentence and above that level together. An exception is Longacre, who assumes that: Discourse has grammatical structure and this structure is partially expressed in the hierarchical breakdown of discourses into constituent embedded discourses and paragraphs and in the breakdown of paragraphs into constituent embedded paragraphs and sentences — not to speak of further hierarchical parcelling out into clauses, phrases, and word structures. 46 4 5 Francis, 1958, p. 293. 4 6 Longacre, 1979, p.115. The Text Structure 77 f A text planner needs to be capable of planning entire paragraphs of text By making the constituent structure uniform above and below the level of the sentence, the text planner can use the same mechanisms for adding a paragraph to a text as an adjective to a noun phrase. A node in Text Structure can dominate a constituent of any size, from a word to a paragraph, to an entire text, capturing die uniformity of constituency at all of these levels. Also uniform are the structural relations among constituents. Structural relations capture how a parent and its children are related, and, more importantly, where additional nodes can be added to the Text Structure. The structural relations form two basic subtree types in Text Structure, kernels and composites, as shown in Figure 4.5. I HEAD I | ARGUMENT | | ARGUMENT | _ Kernel Subtree I COMPOSITE I I COMPOSITE I j MATRIXJ J ADJUNCT | _ { COORDINATE*! 1 CXX)RDMATE{ _ Composite Subtrees Figure 4.6 Subtree types A kernel has a head at the root and arguments as children, and is essentially a predicate/argument structure, such as a relation expressed by a verb or a subordinate conjunction.

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  The Translator As Communicator

  • Basil Hatim, Ian Mason(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 Interpreting: a text linguistic approach

  The principal aim of this chapter is to explore possible applications of text linguistics to the training of interpreters. Focusing on those aspects of our discourse processing model which relate to the oral mode of translating, we shall see how distinctions such as the static vs. the dynamic (Chapter 2 ) are of concern to the interpreter as well as the translator. Rather than emphasizing differences due to field of translating, mode of translating or translator focus, we will in this chapter explore areas of common interest in the processing of texts. The central theme however is interpreting. In particular, the three strands of textuality— texture, structure and context—will be shown to correlate in a number of interesting ways and to varying degrees of relevance, with the three basic forms of interpreting— liaison, consecutive and simultaneous.

  HOW TEXTS HANG TOGETHER

  The three basic domains of textuality identified in Chapter 2 are texture, structure and context. The term ‘texture’ covers the various devices used in establishing continuity of sense and thus making a sequence of sentences operational (i.e. both cohesive and coherent). We can illustrate the operational nature of texts with the help of a number of examples seen from the perspective of oral translating. Our first Sample (3.1 ) is taken from the edited text of President Bush’s declaration on 25 February 1991 concerning strategy in the Gulf War.

  Sample 3.1

  (…) (1) The coalition will, therefore, continue to prosecute the war with undiminished intensity. (2) As we announced last night, we will not attack unarmed soldiers in retreat. (3) We have no choice but to consider retreating combat units as a threat, and respond accordingly. (4) Anything else would risk additional coalition casualties. (…)

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