Textual interaction

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Textual interaction

• A third year course in English text linguistics

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Dates 2009

• Thursday 1 October
• Wednesday 7 October
• Thursday 8 October
• Wednesday 14 October
• Thursday 15 October
• Wednesday 21 October
• Thursday 22 October
• Wednesday 28 October
• Thursday 29 October
• Wednesday 4 November Prova in itinere
  presentations
• Thursday 5 November Prova in itinere
  presentations
• Monday 9 November SELLS seminar
• Thursday 12 November Conclusions and feedback

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Bibliography

• Textual interaction an introduction to written
  discourse analysis. Michael Hoey Routledge London
  2001.
• Hunston S and Thompson G Oxford Linguistics
  Series, 2000 (in Biblioteca)
• Bloomer et al. Introducing Language in Use,
  chapters 1,3,4
• Appraisal website http//www.grammatics.com/appra
  isal
• Martin et al.AppraisalIntertextual
  positioningEngagement and Dialogical positioning
• Watts, R.J. Politeness
• Course Handouts and texts for analysis in
  self-access lab.
• For reference Cambridge Grammar of English
• Longmans Grammar of Spoken and Written English

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Learning outcomes the ability to

• Find your way in controversies and polarities
• Engage with texts
• Understand arguments
• Understand assessments and evaluations
• Attribute responsability for statements
• Identify patterns

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Course objectives

• Knowledge
• Understanding
• Application of your knowledge and understanding
  to actual texts
• Learning abilities study skills
• Communication
• Autonomous judgement

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Investigating language

• We will be investigating language through texts
  and texts through language.
• There will be a seminar type organisation
  involving group work and group presentations

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Prova in itinere

• Intended to check your abilities to
• Use your learning skills for a specific task
• Do background reading for a purpose
• Summarise material
• Communicate findings effectively
• Use knowledge and understanding to analyse texts
• Apply your autonomous judgements to the whole task

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And after..

• If you are going on to do the specialistica we
  will be looking at how some of these issues are
  played out in the construction of identity in
  literary narrative texts
• If you are going to write your tesina use the
  skills you have acquired to help you with your
  reading and the writing process and for your
  presentation

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Research projects

• If you are interested in language research and
  what to know what goes on look out for the SELLS
  events ( Seminar in English Language and
  Linguistics in Siena) where people present work
  in progress

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Some examples of language investigation

• Literary criticism -
• Political language -
• Newspaper discourse
• Advertising language
• On-line communication
• Classroom discourse
• Forensic linguistics

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Language functions

• Within a view of language as a social semiotic,
  part of a social system, whwere language is
  interpreted as part of a network of relations
  with sturctures coming in as the realization of
  these relationships, language is seen as having
  three main metafunctions

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Ideational metafunction

• Language construes human experience, it names
  things and transforms facets of experience into
  meanings. This is the ideational metafunction of
  language language as reflection.

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Interpersonal metafunction

• We also use language to enact our personal and
  social relationships, it is personal and
  interactive. We give and demand information,
  goods and services, express opinions. This is the
  interpersonal metafunction language as action
  through propositions and proposals

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Textual metafunction

• Every message is both about something and
  addressing someone.
• Another mode of meaning, an enabling or
  facilitating function, relates to the
  construction and organisation of text.
• This is the textual metafunction which creates
  relevance to context through thematic
  organisation and information focus

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A statement

• (about Northanger Abbey)
• In the course of the narratives, heroines usually
  live through an adventure and are threatened by a
  villain. In _NA_, Catherine is even warned of the
  latter by her mother before Catherine leaves
  Fullerton for Bath at the beginning of the novel
  (6). (5.2.2)
• Is this true??

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• The person who made the statement didnt look
  closely enough at the text and didnt catch the
  interpersonal and textual meanings.
• See text Northanger Abbey

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Text

• Text the record of some speakers or speakers
  discourse, uttered or written in some context and
  for some purpose. Any corpus is simply a compiled
  collection of texts, either spoken or written, or
  both. A corpus consists of the records of
  authentic discourses, of actual uses of a
  language in their social contexts. (Gordon Tucker)

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text

• The visible evidence of a reasonably
  self-contained purposful interaction between one
  or more writers and one or more readers in which
  the writer(s) control(s) the interaction and
  produce(s) most of the language
• Michael Hoey

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Texts

• Are produced in a context
• For a purpose
• Have appropriacy
• Make sense in the context
• Have cohesion and coherence
• Are complete

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• Throughout their lives, speakers engage in a
  multitude of different discourses, both as
  performers and addressees. They do so, typically,
  one discourse at a time. Over the course of a
  lifetime, an individual human may participate in
  thousands of casual conversations, write and read
  hundreds of postcards, listen to numerous
  speeches of various kinds, read scores of
  recipes, instructional leaflets, tax forms etc.

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• As our communicative competence develops, we not
  only develop varying degrees of what we might
  term generic competence, we also come to have
  expectations associated with the use of language
  in a vast range of contexts. Indeed, I would wish
  to argue that our interpretation of any
  linguistic form, however simple or complex, from
  a single word form to a whole discourse, is based
  primarily on the expectations that we develop in
  the course of our odyssey through a life of
  linguistic interaction. And expectation is
  inextricably linked to context, both to local
  linguistic co-text and to wider social context.

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experience

• Our experience of texts helps us to recognise
  them, through their distinctive features
• Five levels

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The distinctive features of a language variety
(1)

• Graphic features the general presentation and
  organisation of the written language, defined in
  terms of such factors as distinctive typography,
  page design, spacing, use of illustrations, and
  colour for example, the variety of newspaper
  English (headlines, columns, captions)
• Orthographic or graphological features the
  writing system of an individual language,
  distinctive use of the alphabet, capital letters,
  spelling, punctuation, and ways of expressing
  emphasis (italics, bold, underlining) eg. English
  vs. American newspapers, advertisements (Beanz
  meanz Heinz)

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The distinctive features of a language variety (2)

• lexical features the vocabulary of a language
  defined in terms of the set of words and idioms
  given distinctive use within a variety for
  example, legal English employs such expressions
  as heretofore, alleged as Latin expressions such
  as ex post facto
• grammatical features the many possibilities of
  syntax and morphology, defined in terms of such
  factors as the distinctive use of sentence
  structure word order, and word inflections for
  example, religious English makes use of an
  unusual vocative construction ( O God who knows)
  and second person singular set of pronouns (thou,
  thee, thine)

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The distinctive features of a language variety (3)

• discourse features the structural organisation
  of a text, defined in terms of such factors as
  coherence, relevance, paragraph structure, and
  the logical progression of ideas for example, a
  journal paper within scientific English typically
  consists of a fixed sequence of sections
  including the abstract, introduction,
  methodology, results, discussion and conclusion

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Interaction

• What goes on in the reading process depends very
  much on the participants and their experience

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Who is involved

• 4 participants
• Author gives authority /Authorises/Takes
  responsibility
• Writer composes/Reponsibilities for language
• Audience the ideal reader, intended readership
• Reader the person who actually processes the text

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You and texts

• Try listing all the texts you remember reading in
  the last week
• Purpose (why you read it)
• Author
• Intended readership
• Distinctive features
• Now look at the next text

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Textual interaction

• The fundamental fact that texts gain their
  meaning from readers interaction with them
• How this interaction can be detected the
  linguistic implications
• The cooperative writer
• The active reader
• The manipulative writer
• The mechanical reader
• Transactional and interactive discourse

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interaction in action

• Interactivity a matching process
• Communicative competences
• Needs and expectations
• Schemata
• How to read
• How to write

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Interaction

• Text does not exist except as a part of a
  commitment to interaction in which each
  contributor to the interaction has needs to meet
  at the same time as respecting the needs of the
  other
• The readers purpose will not always completely
  match the authors
• Both authors and readers have expectations

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Language investigation

• The most interesting parts of language
  investigation are about the less obvious aspects,
  not the surface meanings, the interpersonal or
  textual metafunction aspects which can reveal a
  midset or a pattern, prejudices, preferences and
  many other aspects of language and its use
• There are various methodologies used to
  investigate texts, both qualitative and
  quantitative.

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Reading

• Michael Hoey
• Textual interaction
• Chapters 1 - 3