Key Elements for Analyzing Text Structure and Meaning
Understanding Text Analysis Elements
Authorial Voice and Subjectivity in Texts
Identifying the author’s stance is crucial. Look for:
- Expertise: Is the author knowledgeable (e.g., a journalist, specialist)? This is often shown through data, references, and thoughtful reflections.
- First-Person Perspective: The use of first-person verbs (e.g., “I think”), pronouns (e.g., “my”), and determiners indicates a personal viewpoint.
- Subjectivity Markers: Opinion pieces explicitly show the author’s attitude through:
- Valuative language: Adjectives, adverbs, and other evaluative expressions.
- Sentence variety: Use of exclamatory, interrogative, or dubitative (expressing doubt) sentences alongside declarative ones. Language markers like hopefully, maybe, probably signal uncertainty.
- Verb moods: While the indicative mood may prevail, other moods like the subjunctive or conditional can reveal subjectivity.
- Modal verbs: Combinations expressing possibility (can, may), obligation (must, should), or doubt (might).
- Stylistic Choices: Authors use style to emphasize the message, sometimes giving it a literary quality through irony or figurative language (metaphors, similes, personification).
Sender, Receiver, and Function in Communication
Analyzing the Sender
Consider the sender’s identity:
- Real Sender: The actual author of the message.
- Social Role: Does the author speak as a private citizen, friend, expert, etc.?
- Polyphony: Are other voices included (e.g., quotes, reported speech) to support the author’s point?
- Register: Does the speaker adjust their language based on the situation, audience, or setting?
- Irony: Is there a difference between what is said and what is meant?
Understanding the Receiver
Consider the intended audience:
- Identity: Is the receiver an individual or a group? What is their assumed educational level or social class?
- Ideal Receiver: The audience the sender primarily intends to reach.
- Model Receiver: The type of receiver envisioned by the sender during text creation.
- Social Relationship: Is the receiver addressed in a specific capacity (e.g., public official, friend)?
- Presence: Is the receiver explicitly acknowledged in the text?
Identifying Communication Functions
- Expressive Function: Transmits the sender’s ideas or feelings. Evident through modalization, first-person perspective, possessive determiners, adjectives, exclamations, and rhetorical questions.
- Appellative (Conative) Function: Aims to influence the receiver’s actions or attention. Uses imperatives, exclamations, and direct questions.
Context: Knowledge and Intertextuality
Role of Encyclopedic Knowledge
This refers to the shared knowledge between sender and receiver that is necessary or helpful for understanding the text’s references, assumptions, and overall meaning.
Understanding Intertextuality
This occurs when a text incorporates phrases, fragments, or references from other texts. It can be used to reinforce an idea, add humor, or create a specific effect.
Key Linguistic Features in Texts
Modalization: Expressing Attitude
Modalization reflects the speaker’s degree of certainty or attitude towards the proposition. Examples include expressing:
- Obligation: e.g., “We must improve.”
- Possibility: e.g., “About thirty people might come.”
- Doubt/Uncertainty: e.g., “He must have entered.” (inferential) or “Perhaps he entered.”
Authorial Intentionality
This refers to the sender’s purpose or intention in the communicative act – what they aim to achieve by producing the text.
Achieving Textual Cohesion
Defining Cohesion and Coherence
Cohesion refers to the linguistic resources that link sentences, paragraphs, and sections, creating explicit connections within a text. Coherence refers to the overall logical sense and unity of the text’s ideas. While cohesion supports coherence, it doesn’t guarantee it.
Common Cohesion Techniques
The most common cohesion resources include reiteration, substitution, ellipsis, and discourse markers.
Reiteration as a Cohesive Device
Reiteration involves repeating elements within the text.
Phonic Reiteration
Repeating sounds or sound patterns (often stylistic).
Enunciative Modality Repetition
Repeating sentence types (e.g., declarative, exclamatory, interrogative, hortatory, optative, dubitative) for effect.
Lexical Repetition Uses
Repeating words or phrases. While simple repetition can be a stylistic flaw, authors may use it intentionally for emphasis or intensification. It’s also common in advertising to reinforce product names or features.
Connectors and Discourse Markers
These words or phrases link successive units of text, signaling relationships between ideas. Examples include:
- Temporal: before, then, afterwards…
- Additive: moreover, also, in addition…
- Causal: so, therefore, because, as a result…
- Contrastive: however, on the contrary, but…
- Explanatory/Reformulating: that is, in other words, specifically…
- Ordering: first, next, finally…
Ellipsis: Omitting the Understood
Ellipsis is the omission of words or phrases that are grammatically necessary but can be understood from the context, avoiding redundancy.
Substitution Using Synonyms
Using synonyms (words with similar meanings) or other related terms (hyponyms, hypernyms) to refer back to something previously mentioned without excessive repetition.
Deixis: Pointing Within Text
Deictic expressions are words whose meaning depends on the context of the utterance (who is speaking, time, and place). They ‘point’ to people (you, they), places (here, there), or time (today, now, then) relative to the communication situation.