Categorising Texts - How to Group

Grouping Texts

Categorising Texts employs a strategy called GROUPING.

You need to group texts according to a linguistic feature they both share. You have more than a hundred features to choose from.

1. Choose the linguistic feature that 2-4 texts share. The areas you can choose form are as follows:
Lexis
the vocabulary system; meaning at word and phrase level (includes semantics)
• Grammar
the structural relationships within and between sentences and utterances
• Phonetics/ Phonology
the sounds of English, how they are produced and how they are described; including aspects of prosody
• Pragmatics
the ways in which social conventions and implied meanings are encoded in spoken and written language
• Discourse
(i) longer stretches of text, looking particularly at aspects of cohesion
(ii) the way texts create identities for particular individuals, groups or institutions e.g. the discourse of law, politics, the media
• Graphology
language as a semiotic system creating meaning through textual design, signs and images.
• Register
situational variation and register: how language varies in relation to audiences, purposes and contexts
• Mode
how language may vary as a consequence of the channel of communication (speech, writing and mixed modes)
• Idiolect
the language style acquired by individuals as a result of their personal characteristics, systems of belief and social experience
• Dialect
the variations in language produced as a result of local community and regional diversity
• Sociolect
language variations produced by the effects of education, socio-economic class, systems of belief, occupation and membership of social groups.

2. You then find examples of this particular linguistic feature in action and give them as EXAMPLES.
3. You are now going to show your understanding of the reasons behind the groupings by explaining why they have used the feature and subtle differences between their usages (e.g. three texts may use concrete nouns in the form of names but one text uses first name to form a relationship, one uses surname to show formality due to it being a solicitors’ letter and the other uses a full educational title as it is a speech that confers respect on the special guest).