Course introduction

Textuality across linguistics and literature Course introduction

Aims of the course • The course focuses on textuality, with special regard for narrative text types, both in literary and non-literary genres. • It aims to provide students with advanced instruments of analysis selected from influential approaches to the study of language and discourse in both oral and written forms • text linguistics, text grammar • corpus linguistics • narrative analysis • argumentation • Fostering writing and speaking competence at macro and micro level

From the sentence to the text • Up to the ‘70s no establishedmethodologythatwouldapply to texts • Traditionalapproach to the study of language: sentenceasconventionalobject of study • Structuralism (Bloofield, Harris, Chomsky): sentenceas the largestunit with an inherentstructure (cf. Bloomfield 1933: 170). • Meaning as a secondary aspect, because it includes extra-linguistic aspects • Whateverfellbeyond the scope of the sentencewasassigned to the domain of stylistics • 1981: De Beaugrande – Dressler, Introduction to Text Linguistics • 1983: Werlich, A Text Grammar of English • “text linguistics” cannot be a designation for a single theory or method. Instead, itdesignatesany work in language science devoted to the text as the primaryobject of inquiry’

Historical roots: where text linguistics comes from • Rhetoric: • training public orators • textsevaluated in terms of theireffectsupon the audience of receivers; • texts are vehicles of purposefulinteraction. • Stylistics • style results from the characteristicselection of options for producing a text. • literarystudies • Anthropology • languageas human activity; focus on meaning • Sociology • analysis of conversationas a mode of social organization and interaction

Where TL comes from • Rhetoric shares several concerns with text linguistics, notably the assumptions that: • (a) arranging of ideas is open to systematic control; • (b) the transition between ideas and expressions can be subjected to conscious training; • (c) among the various texts which express a given configuration of ideas, some are of higher quality than others; • (d) judgements of texts can be made in terms of their effects upon the audience of receivers; • (e) texts are vehicles of purposeful interaction.

Both Rhetoric and TL concerned with: • “How are discoverable structures built through operations of decision and selection, and what are the implications of those operations for communicative interaction?” as opposed to • “What structures can analysis uncover in a language?”, (traditional linguistic)

Form-effect relation:whatis the differencebetween A and B? • He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond. He spoke thus to the judge: “I am called Jean François Leturc...” • Jean François Leturc was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond. He spoke thus to the judge: “I am called Jean François Leturc...””

Which is stylistically better? • The daughter is said to be well-bred and beautiful; the son an awkward booby, reared up and spoiled at his mother’s apron strings. (Goldsmith 1773: 14) • The daughter is said to be well-bred and beautiful; the son is said to be an awkward booby, reared up and spoiled at his mother’s apron strings. (Goldsmith 1773: 14)

Which is more approapriate as news headline for an Italian audience? • Yemen, bomba davanti a scuola di polizia a Sanaa: 30 morti, 50 feriti. • Dozzine di persone morte o ferite in esplosione davanti a scuola di polizia in Yemen

Module A • The standards of textuality • Focus on argumentative text types Module B • Narrative text types • Narrative analysis • Storytelling

Exam • Module A • The final test consists of written open-ended questions, by means of which students will prove their knowledge of the module contents, as well as linguistic and discursive competence within the field of the humanities. Students attending the course can take this part of the exam during the course. • Students who do not attend the lessons will sit this part of the exam during official examination dates. • Modulo B • Students attending the course will lead a group seminar, involving the class in a discussion on a topic of their choice, on the basis of one of the analytic approaches presented in either module A or B. • Students who do not attend the lessons will replace the seminar with an oral presentation (5-7 minutes), with slideware support, on a topic related to the contents of the module, followed by a brief discussion. In the latter part, questions can be addressed on any content dealt with during the module.

Readings module A • de Beaugrande, R./ Dressler, W. 1981 [2002] Introduction to text linguistics. London and New York: Longman. • Degano, C. (2016) Electoral Posters’ Second Life: Intertextuality in the 2010 UK Electoral Campaign, from Billboards to Web Spoofs. In Marta Degani, Paolo Frassi and Maria Ivana Lorenzetti (Eds.) The Languages of Politics/La politique et ses langages” vol. 2. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 67-90. • Hyland, Ken 2005. Metadiscourse. London: Continuum (Chapters 1 and 3). • Mahlberg, M. 2012. The Corpus Stylistic analysis of fiction – Or the fiction of corpus stylistics?. In Language and Computers, Corpus Linguistics and Variation in English: Theory and Description. Edited by Joybrato Mukherjee and Magnus Huber , pp. 77- 95(19). Rodopi.

Readings module B • Norrick. N. 2001. Conversational narrative. Storytelling in everyday talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins • Simpson, P. 2008. Stylistics. A resource book for students. London and New York: Routledge. • Toolan, M. 2006. Narrative: linguistic and structural theories. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (secon edition), 459-473.

TEXT • An extended structure of syntactic units (Werlich 1983) • A communicative occurrence (deBeaugrande-Dressler 1981) • Any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole. […] A text is a unit of language in use (Halliday-Hasan 1976) • The concept of texture is entirely appropriate to express the property of 'being a text'. A text has texture and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text (deBeaugrande-Dressler 1981).

Standards of textuality • For De Beaugrande –Dressler: seven standards, which serve as constitutive principles of textual communication. Most important ones: cohesion and coherence. • “A text will be defined as a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality. .... (dB-D)

standards of textuality: • cohesion • coherence • intentionality • acceptability • informativity • situationality • intertextuality

Text-internal criteria Cohesion Coherence Text-external criteria Intentionality Acceptability Informativity Situationality Intertextuality “pure” text linguistics Discourse analysis

text linguistics and discourseanalysis • The difference basically lies in the emphasis the two disciplines place on the two sets of criteria of textuality: in the “purely” textlinguistic approaches texts are viewed as “more or less explicit phenomena of cognitive processes” (Tischer et al., 2000: 29), and the context plays a subordinate role, whereas discourse analysis considers both text internal and text external criteria

Standard 1. Cohesion • how the components of the surface text, i.e. the actual words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence. • The surface components depend upon each other according to grammatical forms and conventions, such that cohesion rests upon grammatical dependencies. ...

Cohesive elements inde Beaugrande-Dressler’s model (integrated with Halliday-Hasan’s model)

Use of pro-forms/reference • personal / demonstrative pronouns • There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. Anaphora • He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond. He spoke thus to the judge: “I am called Jean François Leturc...” Cataphora

Use of pro-forms/referencepremodifiers (determiners) Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast. (Wilson 1958: 3) • Specific determiners: • the definite article: the • possessives: my, your, his, her, its; our, their, whose • demonstratives: this, that, these, those • interrogatives: which • Others: such • General determiners • a; an; any; another; other; what

Use of pro-forms/referenceClause substitution • miss hardcastle: I understand you perfectly, sir. • marlow (aside): Egad! and that’s more than I do myself. (Goldsmith 1773: 36): • To this day I am ashamed that I did not spring up and pinion him, then and there. Had I possessed one ounce of physical courage, I should have done so. (Beerbohm 1958: 57)

Use of pro-forms/referenceEllipsis • The daughter is said to be well-bred and beautiful; the son an awkward booby, reared up and spoiled at his mother’s apron strings. (Goldsmith 1773: 14)

Recurrence • There’s water through many homes I would say almost all of them have water in them. It’s just completely under water. 2) And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. (Frost 1969: 224)

Lexical and textual cohesionPartial recurrence ... to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station ... the causes which impel them to the separation. Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable ... Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies. (Declaration of Independence)

Lexical and textual cohesion Parallelism • He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns. • We must hold them Enemies in War,in Peace Friends

Lexical and textual cohesionparaphrase • had never seen a murderer ... the decent symbol which indemnifies the taker of a life. (Beerbohm 1955: 56ff.)

Lexical and textual cohesionCollocation • (1) Phraseological collocation • A strong tea, powerful computer • (2) Looser collocational bonds • Pipe + smoke, Bake + oven • (UK) -- Ernst & Young, the accountancy firm, resigned as auditor to Wembley yesterday, barely a month before the dog track owner and gambling group faces a briberytrial in the United States. /The sudden departure of E&Y, the firm’s auditor since 1999, was included in a trading statement that announced a permanent replacement for chief executive Nigel Potter, who has stepped aside to defend the charges in the US.

Lexical and textual cohesion(ref. to next slide) • Hyponymy/hyperonimy • LIGHT -candles, lanterns, • COLOURS – silver, golden • TABLE – plates and goblets • Meronimy • Great Hall/ ceiling • synonymy / antonimy

THE SORTING HAT • Harry had never even imagined such a strange and splendid place. It was lit by thousands and thousands of candles which were floating in mid-air over four long tables, where the rest of the students were sitting. These tables were laid with glittering golden plates and goblets. (..) The hundreds of faces staring at them looked like pale lanterns in the flickering candlelight. Dotted here and there among the students, the ghosts shone misty silver. (..) Harry looked upwards and saw a velvety black ceiling dotted with stars. (..) It was hard to believe there was a ceiling there at all, and that the Great Hall didn’t simply open on to the heavens. • (From Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. In Freddi, M. “Functional Grammar: An Introduction for the EFL student”.)

Semantic field • Both the notions of collocation (sense 2) and hyponymy are related to the concept of "semantic field" or "semantic domain" • "Related to the concept of hyponymy, but more loosely defined, is the notion of a semantic field or domain. A semantic field denotes a segment of reality symbolized by a set of related words. (Brinton 2000: p. 112)

Functional sentence perspective • This designation suggests that sentence elements can “function” by setting the knowledge they activate into a “perspective” of importance or newness. In many languages, for instance, elements conveying important, new, or unexpected material are reserved for the latter part of the sentence • The term information structure refers to the interface between the structure and meaning of linguistic utterances, on the one hand, and the interlocutors’ mental representations of information, discourse referents, and the overall universe of discourse, on the other. • It is at this interfacing level of mental representation that linguistic rules and constraints on structure-building, interpretation, and processing interact with general cognitive processes involved in belief formation, such as memory, attention, pragmatic reasoning, and general inference processes. • Information structure is responsible for an efficient information transfer between interlocutors, where information transfer consists in the updating of the interlocutors’ mental models of the world, and in the establishment of mutually shared knowledge bases (common grounds) through the exchange of linguistic utterances. • The information structure categories themselves are taken to be universal, whereas their formal reflexes in the grammatical systems of natural languages are subject to cross-linguistic variation.

Information structure:categories Focus and background • Focus is a grammatical category indicating that part of an utterance contributes new. Background is the entity a focus relates to is called its background, or presupposition. Topic and comment • The topic (or theme) of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (or rheme, or sometimes focus) is what is being said about the topic. • Topic is grammaticized in languages like Japanese and Korean, which have a designated topic-marker morpheme affixed to the topic. Some diagnostics have been proposed for languages that lack grammatical topic-markers, like English; • e.g. adding About x, ... Speaking of x, ... As for x, ...) to determine how "topical" x is in that context. Given and new • Intuitively, givenness classifies words and information in a discourse that are already known (or given) by virtue of being common knowledge, or by having been discussed previously in the same discourse ("anaphorically recoverable. Words/information that are not given, or are "textually and situationally non-derivable“are by definition new. (adapted from http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0130.xml and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_structure#Focus_and_background)

Are the dichotomies old-new, focus-background, topic-comment the same? It is not always true that old=background=topic and new=focus=comment: • It is often the case that only part of the comment is in focus. a. As for Svetlana, she works in the OFFICE on weekends. b. As for Svetlana, she works in the office on WEEKENDS. • Comment can be old info: Basil didn’t see the report, and as for Francine, she didn’t see it either. • Focus inside topic: Speaker A: Tell me about the wives of Henry VIII Speaker B: Well, [his FIRSTfocus wife]topic found herself in an unfortunate situation... • Focus needn’t be new information: Did Francine or Gwendoline write the letter? – FRANCINE wrote it.

Information structure: a case study (Degano/Garzone, 2017) • Comparison of English wires and their Italian translations • […] in the English headlines the message builds up towards a climax which comes at the end. • In the Italian translations, the information structure seems geared to a more immediate activation of the mental frame into which the news story is set,

Dozens killed and wounded in Yemen police college blast (7/1/2015, Reuters) • Yemen, bomba davanti a scuola polizia a Sanaa: 30 morti, 50 feriti. (7/1/2015, LaPresse)

Yemen army and Houthi fighters clash in capital (19/1/2015, Reuters) • Yemen, scontri a Sanaa fra esercito e combattenti sciiti houti. (19/1/2015, LaPresse)

This contributes to an immediate appreciation of the core message by the reader while at the same time maximising its newsworthiness. • Ohio, man arrested for planning attack on US Capitol (14/1/2015, Reuters). • Terrorismo: pianificava attacco a Congresso Usa, arrestato. (14/1/2015, LaPresse)

English news wires vs Italian dispatches Parigi, strage al Charlie Hebdo: sospetti ancora in fuga. Senza esitoricerche in Piccardia Siria, raid israeliano contro Hezbollah: sei morti, tra i quali un comandante. Assalto al giornale Charlie Hebdo: 12 morti. Due dei tre killer reduci dalla Siria. Siria, raid israeliano contro Hezbollah: dodici morti tra cui comandante. Yemen nel caos, ribelli sciiti vicini al golpe: occupata tv e agenzia di Stato. Golpe in Yemen, ribelli entrano nel palazzo presidenziale. Is, ondata di attacchi: 25 morti in Iraq. Respintaoffensiva a Kirkuk.

Standard 2. Coherence concerns the ways in which the components of the textual world, i.e. the configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text are mutually accessible and relevant. ... • cohesion = connectivity of the surface • coherence = connectivity of underlying contents

Course introduction