Text Linguistics

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QUESTIONNAIRE IN TEXT LINGUISTICS




1. The Subject Matter of Text Linguistics
2. Approaches of Investigation and Research Methods for the Study of Text in Text Linguistics
3. A Brief Survey of Text Linguistics in historical Perspective
4. Text Linguistics and Pragmatics
5. Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis
6. The Text as a Unit in a Text Linguistics Analysis. Definitions of “Text”. Structure and Composition of Texts.
7. Typology of Texts
8. Constitutive Standards of Textuality
9. Regulative Principles
10. Different Views on Cohesion
11. Anaphora and Cataphora
12. Types of Repetition
13. Synonymization
14. Substitution via Pro-forms
15. Ellipsis
16. Tense and Aspect. Functional Sentence Prospective
17. Lexico-thematic Fields
18. Nominative Chains
19. Coherence
20. Intentionality
21. Acceptability
22. Informativity
23. Situationality
24. Intertextuality
25. Stylistics. Investigating English Style
26. Stylistic Devices. Functional Styles of the English language.



1. The Subj. Matter of TL
Up to the 60s all ling. phenomena were studied & investigated on level sentence. It was impossible realizing how language functions in the process of communication without the study of phenomena like the use of articles, tenses, adjunction & others on text level. This discipline was called TL, text grammar or discourse analysis, which dealt with speech acts & conversation.
TL takes into consideration some regularities, strategies, dominances, preferences & defaults that can study & explain a № of ling. phenomena beyond the sentence level. It is focused on the text, concerning its general & its specific characteristic features, referring to its organization, functions, the context of situation it occurs in + the conditions necessary 4 the human interaction. TL also investigates various text types & their relevance 2 other texts.
The subject of TL deals + the specificity of the text as such, & of diff. text types, written & oral, in their ≠ spheres of usage. The importance of TL can be discussed:
1. in the light of the whole historical background & perspective of studying language & its products;
2. against the background of 20th cent. general linguistics;
3. against the backcloth of their branches of linguistics investigating the text, e.g. pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics etc.




2.Approaches
There R no strict categories & gram. rules in the text that can be taken into consideration in it structuring. There are some standards of textuality, which can serve as a basis 4 defining the parameters of the text. If these standards are not approved then there is non-text.
1. there can be absence of cohesion and coherence, & no relevance to the situation. In such situations, the communication will brake down, or will not be achieved at all. Depending on the participants’ tolerance and prior knowledge of the real world, or the type of the text, communication can be successful.
2. Another factor is the way people understand text. They usually make diff. senses of way they read or hear. This is why the research methods are probabilistic.
TL applies descriptive methods. Distinctive linguistic units used in a text R described & explained taking into consideration a № of factors:
1. The units R related 2 one another in a linear sequence via gram. dependences on surface level & conceptual dependencies in the textual world. (not all elements that modify an element can B placed directly before or after it.) There are some conventions 4 the order in which adj., appear: He is a real young gentleman = the modifiers {young; gentleman} R btw the determiner “a” and the main word “gentleman”). There is often asymmetry in language btw. the plane of form & the plane of content, e.g.: while content is continuous, the expressions that R used 4 rendering that content R discrete elements.
2. The discrete elements have to be systematized and controlled by some orderly principles, which R closely connected + some logical,socio-cultural & situational factors, & they can be analyzed more easily.
3. Analyzing a text, we should regard some factors as motivation, strategies, preferences, defaults, which refer to presuppositions about the info of the text, the participants’ background knowledge about the real world, prior knowledge of other texts related to the text in question, etc.
If a text follows the gram. & structural conventions, it will be easily to process and will take less time and efforts understanding it. But if not, the missing pieces will be filled, because even if there are several choices and possibilities for the realization of the text, some of them are always more preferable than others depending on context of situation. It is proved, that people belonging to the same society or at least to the same social group will decode a text almost in the same way. If users of a language are not familiar with the functioning of the system, the way that language is used, comm. will be blocked.
In the process of comprehension, there are a number of approaches that are applied to text.
B&D dentify text comprehension in terms of problem – solving. Receivers of text try to solve “problems” which appear during their understanding of text. The compreh. will be successful if they go down the text from the “initial state” to the “goal state”, but if there is place of the text, they can not understand, there is a problem, because the “connecting pathway” cannot be “found or defined”, a “block” is occurred.
There R 3 search types, according to B&D, 4 connectivity between states.
1. Depth- first search –when the “problem solver” tries to reach the goal along as they read the text without trying to grasp the details.
2. Breadth- first search – the problem – solver tries to understand the text step by step until they reach the final goal.
3. Means- end analysis – the problem – solver tries to find out what the differences between the initial state and the goal state are, and then reduce them one by one until the goal state is reached.
Stages of the process of text production:
1. Planning- text producer’s intention is attaining some goal via text. Text producers can use, “means- end analysis” to find out in what way the ≠ btw the current state and the goal state can be reduced to the extent.
2. Planning is conn. with the introduction of ideas presented as control centers. If the text producer’s goal is to persuade people or manipulate them, they may try hard to think of intriguing ideas & ways of rendering them, so that they can change the text receiver’s view and actions.
3. The “phase of development” is “a searching of stored knowledge spaces’.
4. The arranging of the expressions in a sequential order bearing in mind the gram. dependencies The last phase of production is called parsing. There is asymmetry btw. the languages (German + Russian have grammatical cases; English have no such cases). This leads to asymmetry btw. the plane of form & of meaning.
II. According to Van Dijk and W. Kintsch, when decoding a text, different recipients apply their own strategies depending on their knowledge base, interests, and opinions. Different readers follow their own cognitive models of the real world stored in their episodic memory, and when needed they compare text presented knowledge with their knowledge of the world. However, there is a certain amount of general information, common to all participants, providing successful comm. In order to understand the whole text, the recipients make presuppositions about what follows in the text. Van Dijk and Kintsch discuss macrostructures in connection with linguistic structures and their syntactic & semantic representations in the text, and in connection with cultural and social factors, related to the communicative context / situation. Macrostructures consist of macro propositions, and are related to discourse cognitive models. The strategies connected with text comprehension include surface structure representations and semantic interpretation of these structures.
There are some schematic strategies specific for the organization of each type of text, and it follows requirements related to the beginning, continuation and end of the text. The moment we see an abstract we immediately start making hypotheses about the following information, the type of text we are going to read, the way it is structured etc. (e.g. scientific film/ article).
In the process of comprehension of texts, the two approaches can be applied, because as one reads a text one tries to find the most appropriate way for understanding the text form beginning to end. Here could be used one of the three search types suggested by B&D. One applies some of the strategies for text comprehension suggested by Van Dijk and Kintsch, connected with the structuring of the text – syntactic and semantic- as well as + some background knowledge, knowledge about the real world, some presuppositions about the context of the text, etc.

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