Text Analysis - H.G. Widdowson

Dr TajeddinBy: Sh. Tamizrad

Fall 2014

Content

• Actually attested language

• Norms of usage

• Patterns of collocation

• Semantic prosodies

• Conclusion

Actually attested language

• Chapter 1:

Communication involves the production of text to indicate intended meaning.

• Chapter 2:

Hymes’ Communicative Competence:

1. How far it conforms to what is lexically and grammatically encoded in the language.

2. How easy it is to process

3. How the text can be related to context to bring about references, force and effect.

4. To what extent a particular text is attested as actually occurring usage.

Communication involves the selective

use of the encoded resources of lexis

and grammar, and we have been

looking at what motivation there

might be for the selection of one

possibility rather than another.

Norms of Usage

• Corpus and electronically analysis

– 1. frequency 2. range

• If it is abnormally rare, we might then infer that its

selection goes against the manner maxim and so creates

an implicature.

• e.g. circumventing a hindrance

• e.g. Henry Green’s novel Living

Relative frequency can be taken as

having a schematic significance in

that certain words mark particular

genres or discourse domains.

Patterns of Collocation

• Corpus analysis:

1. Frequency and range of single items

2. Frequency and patterns of co-occurrence with other items (collocation)

• Collocation goes beyond the relationship between

two lexical items in a noun phrase to include many

other recurring combinations in phrases like: as a

matter of fact.

• Concordance: displays all occurrences of a

particular word in lines of text so that one can see

at a glance where co-textual combinations recur.

Corpus analysis reveals that the

constituents of texts are not

much separate words and

structure as patterns of

language, collocations and lexical

bundles, of variable flexibility.

The use of recurring patterns of

language, stored ready for use in

the mind, is in this case motivated

by the co-operative principle. To

deliberately disregard them would

be to violate the manner maxim.

Semantic prosodies

What motivates the use of particular

collocational combinations?

• To signal membership of a particular community

• General semantic principle

We can explain particular

collocational combinations in

texts by identifying the more

general semantic properties of

the words concerned.

• There other collocational patterns that can be

related to schematic knowledge in that they can

be said to represent the way reality is

conceptually constructed by a community of

language users.

• A comparison of concordances from different

domains of use altogether might indicate

degrees of schematic generality (the extent to

which the collocations reflect a particular or

more general set of cultural assumptions.

Conclusion

• Computer analysis of corpora provides profiles

of the occurrence and co-occurrence of textual

features and these serve as a norm of what is

customary against which any particular instance

of usage can be compare.

Conclusion

• Having a deviation from the norm, a departure

from what is expected, is to be taken as acting

contrary to the co-operative principle and will

create an implicature (there is some underlying

significance, some effect intended beyond what is actually

said).

• Textual analysis can only tell about texts,

the language that people produce in the

process of communication. No information

about the process itself!

• Texts only have reality for the language

user as a means to an end, as a way of

mediating discourse, and they are not

normally produced as an end in

themselves.

Conclusion

• By corpus analysis they are analyzed and an

end in themselves and a wealth of new

information about how text are constructed is

provided.