discourse and text analysis

1. Text Analysis - H.G. Widdowson
Dr Tajeddin
By: Sh.Tamizrad
Fall 2014

2. Content
• Actually attested language
• Norms of usage
• Patterns of collocation
• Semantic prosodies
• Conclusion

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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

6. Relative frequency can be taken as
having a schematic significance in
that certain words mark particular
genres or discourse domains.

7. Patterns of Collocation
• Corpus analysis:
1. Frequency and range of single
items
2. Frequency and patterns of co-
occurrence with other items
(collocation)

8. • 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Semantic prosodies
What motivates the use of particular
collocational combinations?
• To signal membership of a particular community
• General semantic principle

12. We can explain particular
collocational combinations in
texts by identifying the more
general semantic properties of
the words concerned.

13. • 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.

14. • 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.

15. 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.

16. 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).

17. • Textual analysis can only tell about texts,
the language that people produce in the
process of communication. No information
about the process itself!

18. • 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.

19. 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.