Categorising Texts

Looking at Categorising Texts, consider the following topics:

Context
Register
Audience
Purpose

Lexis and Semantics

• What word classes are used?
• Any collocations
• Use of pronouns?
• Use of verbs?
• Use of nouns?
• Adjectives and adverbs?
• Lexical/Semantic Fields
• Lexical connectors
• Synonyms/Antonyms
• Denotation/Connotation
• Figurative Language (similes, metaphors)
• Under/Over specify

Discourse Structure

• How does it start?
• Is it laid out in a logical order?
• Is it cohesive or disjointed? What is used to make it flow?
• Subheadings, headings?
• Chronological structure?
• Narrative structure
• Analysis (breaking down ideas into constituent parts)
• Problem solution (identifies a problem to be solved)

Spoken Discourse Structure

• Is the conversation laid out in adjacency pairs? (Greetings, questions, answers, command and response)
• Does the conversation follow a logical pattern?
• Is there turn taking?

How is it organised?

o Dominant speaker?

o Equal turns?

o Who signals the end/start of a turn?

o Topic management (who has the control?)

• What speaker moves are used: framing, initiating, focusing, challenging (interruption of a topic)
• Tag Questions
• Fillers
• Discourse markers (anyway, so,)
• False Starts
• Ellipsis and Ellision

Grammar and Syntax

• Does the grammar conform to the formality of the situation? (The more formal the more standard the grammar patterns)
• What sentence structures are used?

• What clause structures are used?

• What kinds of utterances are used? (declarative, imperative, emotive)

• Use of adverbial intensifiers to enhance meaning? (very, a bit)
• Incomplete utterances.
• False starts and pauses
• Contractions
• Qualifiers

Graphology - The visual elements of a text.

• Font choices
• Layout
• Inclusion of pictures

Phonology

• Assonance
• Alliteration
• Accents and Dialect

Pragmatics

• Context, implication and inference
• Grice’s Maxims
• Diexis
• What meanings do we take from words
• Background knowledge and modern language.