First year session 1

Text work

Language in use

• Using a language means dealing with texts, carrying out tasks in contexts, in situations for particular purposes

• For this a user needs a series of competences: awareness, knowledge and skills which are acquired through experience, and being exposed to texts in contexts.

competences

• The competences a user needs involve:• Phonological competence• Lexical competence• Syntactic competence• Pragmatic or discourse competence• Functional competence and sociolinguistic

competence• Each concerns a different level of the language

You as learners

• When people speak or write they produce text.

• As language users you deal with texts all the time.

• This course aims to help you become better at understanding and producing texts in English by giving you an overview of a description of the language.

• By the end of the course you should be able to:

• recognise and identify many of the features which are involved in text production and reception using the words and expressions that people use to describe and refer to language.

• This is useful when you come to talk about the effects a text is likely to produce and when you want to evaluate a text on aesthetic or functional grounds

Language about language

• These words and expressions, used when describing or discussing language, are called metalanguage.

• Being able to use metalanguage correctly shows you have studied the language and are able to use the terminology found in your studies.

Course description

• For a full description of Lingua inglese I see:• http://web.lett.unisi.it/ap/pgd_frontend_12/

codice/rr/csf-dettaglio_ud-2.html

Aims of the course

• To give you some knowledge of a descriptive system

• To give you a metalanguage for the description of language

• To give you experience of language analysis and text analysis

• To provide you with more awareness, knowledge and skills about the English language than you had before.

Course outline Levels of language

• Morphology• the study of word structure• Syntax• the study of how words combine to form larger units• Semantics• the study of meaning• Discourse analysis• the study of larger patterns of meaning• Pragmatics• the study of language in use

Aims in brief

• ‘knowledge of English’ – Describing the English Language– Ways of analysing the English language

• ‘know how’– Communicative competence– text analysis skills

Your tasks

• Work in class, tasks and texts• Reading• Noticing and reflecting• Bringing examples of interesting linguistic

data• Making sure you have taken in the content of

one session before the next

resources

• Working with texts. Carter et al (chapters 2,3,4)

• Lingua inglese I dispensa and slides will be put up on website http://docenti.lett.unisi.it/frontend/?rr=BD_19_18

• Cambridge encyclopaedia. Crystal (in self-access lab)

• Non-frequentanti who have chosen not to accept the offerta didattica need to register as non-frequentanti, read the slides and the dispensa and do the tasks (which were done in class) from the materials and send their answers to me. .

• Everyone does the written exam.• The mark is put together with the result of the

lettorato exam

The exam for this module

• Prova in itinere (written Jan 24) – a text to analyse, labelling parts of the text to show your ability to identify and name parts of discourse and features typical of a genre or purpose

• Some questions on the content of the course• Mark goes together with the result of the

lettorato exam to get the 9 credits

texts

• When people speak or write they produce text. As language users you deal with texts all the time. This course aims to help you become better at understanding and producing texts in English by giving you an overview of several levels of description of the language. In particular we will look at media texts and their contexts

Text:

• “the record of some speaker’s or writers’ discourse, uttered or written in some context and for some purpose.”

• A text makes sense• We can understand what the text is about.• We can translate a text.• We can paraphrase a text.• We can summarise a text.

A spoken text

•Help!

Same message, different mode

A written text

•No smoking

txting

• Out: Party 4 m’s bday on sat. Wanna come???? Alone or with friend

• In: up 4 party! Time/place? Will b alone

• Out: Gr8,2morrow @my place, 9ish. C U

A text message• DO U STILL FANCY GOING OUT 2MORO NITE? ME

AND EMMA R DEFINATES• ILL RING DAN AND ANY1 ELSE WHO WANTS 2 JOIN

US IS MORE THAN WELCOME!

• What can you guess about the people involved in this communication and what did you use when making your guesses?

• We can guess that these people know each other quite well and have an informal and casual relationship with symmetrical power relationship.

• Clues: use of first names, abbreviations, use of numbers to represent sounds, spelling errors, informal lexis, punctuation etc are all among the signals. Can you select and identify these in the texts? Use a label or colours.

Same meaning different text type• Are you still interested in going out tomorrow night? Emma and I will definitely be going. I will ring Dan, and anyone else who would like to join us is more than welcome to do so.

• Notice the differences.• DO U STILL FANCY GOING OUT 2MORO NITE?

ME AND EMMA R DEFINATES• ILL RING DAN AND ANY1 ELSE WHO WANTS 2

JOIN US IS MORE THAN WELCOME!

context

• No texts are constructed in isolation. Language is a social practice.

• Meaning is dependent on context, the events and situational factors in which acts of communication are embedded (the subject or topic, the purpose or reason for communicating, the circumstances, the physical context, the relationship between addresser and addressee, their previous contact with each other and the topic)

varieties• Language has varieties: there are regional and social

varieties. • The technical term for those varieties which depend

on differences of social use is register. • Register can be divided into field of discourse

(subject matter: e.g chemistry, linguistics, music) tenor of discourse (sometimes referred to as style, e.g formal, informal, intimate) and mode of discourse (medium of the language activity, spoken, written, face to face, twitter etc).

Language variation: register

• Mode - Textual– Spoken– Written

• Domain - Experiential– Subject matter e.g. legal English, language of science– & Function e.g. language of advertising

• Tenor - Interpersonal– Who are you writing/talking to? What is your relationship

with them?– Social context

Register

• A variety tied to the communicative occasion or context affected by the speaker’s knowledge of the hearer’s intentions, state of mind,

• The speaker’s constraints• The context• The number of people involved• The topic

Registers

• We can distinguish between formal (or oratorial) register

• Deliberative (or consultative) register• And intimate (or casual) register

relationships

• Much depends on the relationship between the people concerned and the purpose of the discourse

• Sometimes relationships are simulated for a purpose (for example in advertisements a familiar relationship is simulated even though the writer does not actually know the reader)

Signals of (in)formality

• In Italian the choice of tu or lei is a matter of register. In English there is no such distinction but the use of first name rather than title and surname is one of register.

• The use of first and second person pronouns in a text is an indication of informality. Third person and impersonal forms are more connected with formal writing.

• The Latinate part of English vocabulary is usually connected with more formal registers while the Anglo-saxon monosyllabic words are more likely to be used in informal registers.

• Phrasal verbs are often informal versions of a latinate lexical item

• Contractions are more informal than full forms

Domain and text type

• Language is used in a variety of domains (public, personal, occupational, educational). The interplay of contexts and domains has brought about the development of recognisable genres or text types

• There are regular variations of form according to register and genres develop from register used for a particular purpose.

A discourse analysis task

• Look at the task in Worksheet 1 and the texts in Texts 2013

• Text Analysis Similarities and differences.

We are primed for certain features

• We learn to recognise genres by being exposed to them, we are primed by the texts we have encountered and have expectations.

• The way we read a text depends on how many similar texts we have read before and the expectations we have about such texts. Most texts show the distinctive features of the language variety or genre they belong to:

Graphic features

• 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

• 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), websites and names e.g. weblingu@; text messages: U r, gr8

Lexical features

• 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 and Latin expressions such as sub judice

Grammatical features• 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 archaic second person singular set of pronouns (thou, thee, thine)

• Informal English uses contracted forms

Discourse features

• 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

Fast processing comes from familiarity

• The more we read the more such features become familiar, and the less need we have to process them consciously

• the quicker we can read and gather the information from a text, the more expert we become in interpreting meanings.

• The less familiar we are with texts and text types the harder our task is.

Expectations from familiarity

• If you read : once upon a time ...• what do you begin to expect?• If you hear: “three men went into a bar, an

Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman...” • what kind of text do you expect?

Text tasks

• Analyse the following extracts: • identify as much as you can about the purpose of the

text and the context from which the extract comes (field, tenor and mode) and discuss any features of the wording (lexis, structures) that you can relate to that context.

• The lexis will often provide the easiest clues but try to go beyond that to identify other features as well.

• 1. Day return to Liverpool please• 2. To make brown rolls divide the dough into

18 equal portions – each should weigh about 50g(2 oz). On an unfloured surface roll each piece of dough into a ball inside your cupped hand. Press down hard first then ease up to shape them nicely

• 3. Brown wins race for first Obama visit• 4. Poor Pakistan pray rain will save them

What is this text from?

• 4. Pick up a handful of soil in your garden. Ordinary, unexciting earth. Yet it is one of nature’s miracles and one of her most complex products. Your success as a gardener will largely depend on its condition, so take the first step in gardening. Get to know your soil.

Vocabulary

• Look at the words below

fire, holy, trepidation, rise, conflagration, mount, fear, ascend, flame, sacred, terror, consecrated

– Can you divide them into 4 groups of (near) synonyms? Which do you think are most/least formal?

Etymological concerns : register

• Germanic root– Spoken– frequent– Informal– Private– Simple (monosyllabic)– Affective– Concrete

• Latin root– Written– Rare– Formal– Public– Complex (polysyllabic)– Neutral– Abstract

Spoken vs written mode

• Fillers: um, er• Repetition: ‘a friend of mine like he er

suddenly turned up er in the airport my best friend’

• Discourse structure: e.g. the opening• Double subject (my friend, he)• Repetition (a friend, my best friend)• hesitations

Language variation: register• Task 2. Mode

1. Monday 5 OctoberDear Dan,I'm writing you a quick note as I missed you this afternoon. Would it be possible for you to take my first-year stylistics seminar for me next Thursday at 3pm? Because Frank is ill the department needs someone senior to take his place at the University's Admissions Committee meeting, and our beloved leader says I'm the only person who knows all the relevant background details. The meeting clashes with my class, I'm afraid, which will be very difficult to reschedule, and as far as I can see, you are the best person to take it over. I hope you can you help me out. I'd be grateful if you could let me know tomorrow (Tuesday) at the latest.Best wishes,Mick

2. A. got a minute dan? sorry to um barge in like this but I need a f-favour - suddenly I can't teach my thursday at 3 class - frank's gone down with some bug and er I've got got to reprerepresent the department at the er the university admissions committee starts at 2 - can you run it for me?B. yeah no problemA. you're a mate I owe you oneB. no big deal I've already prepared the stuff for my class

3. From: Short, MickSent: 05 October 2002To: McIntyre, DanSubject: can you do me a favourHi DanI need a quick favour. Can you tyeach my class Tyhursday @3? Frank's got a bug and Tony wants me to take his place at the admissions cttee. Sorry to dump on you.M

Language variation: register• Task 3. Domain

• The following provisions of this clause are a Statement of the general aims of the Charity to which the Trustees are (subject to the following) to have regard at all times but no part of or provision in such Statement is to qualify derogate from add to or otherwise affect the Objects set out in clause 3.1 and the furtherance of the Objects (which shall in the event of any conflict prevail over such Statement)

• The exact way in which information is 'coded' in the auditory nerve is not clear. However, we know that any single neurone is activated only by vibration on a limited part of the basilar membrane. Each neurone is 'tuned' and responds to only a limited range of frequencies.

Language variation: register

• Task C. Tenor

• PENSION AXE VOW UNIONS yesterday threatened a wave of strikes to stop bosses axing workers' pension schemes.

TUC warns of strikes TUC warns of strikes over pensions crisisover pensions crisis

BRITAIN'S EMPLOYERS BRITAIN'S EMPLOYERS were put on alert were put on alert yesterday that yesterday that employees were employees were increasingly prepared to increasingly prepared to take industrial action to take industrial action to defend their pensions, defend their pensions, now the single most now the single most important issue at work.important issue at work.

• Often the distinction is not so much between written and spoken but rather between whether a text is produced in a context dependent situation and whether it is planned or unplanned

• a political speech• a conversation in a

shop• an academic lecture• a phone call to a

friend• a joke• TV news broadcast

• a novel• a sign e.g. ‘no

bicycles’• a magazine article• chat• a letter• a form

Can you you place these texts on the continuum?

Unplanned

Context dependent

Planned

Context independent

And more…

• Some useful study material

• http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic6a/variation_register/8variationreg.htm

• http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic1a/1advertising2.htm