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).

Accent and Dialect

• Accent – A distinct way of pronouncing a language
  

• Dialect – a variety of a language that is distinguished from others by changes in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary

• Creole – A combination of two or more languages into one

• Pidgin – A simplified form of language

• Standard English (S.E.) - is a term generally applied to a form of the English language that is thought to be normative for educated native speakers.

• Jargon – is a terminology which relates to one particular group, activity or profession

• Slang – is the the use of highly informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's dialect or language.

Speech and Writing

Speech and Writing Features

Speech

• Decoded by the ear
• Transient; ephemeral; impermanent; what is said cannot be captured (unless taped)
• May be spontaneous; unplanned
• Allows interaction and immediate feedback; overlaps and interruptions
• Allows non-verbal signals; gestures and body language
• Unfinished sentences; false starts; hesitations; repetitions
• Interrupted constructions; disjuncture
• May use non-standard grammar
• Contractions (use of elision) eg. can’t; I’ll
• Pauses and fillers eg. er; I mean; sort of
• Colloquial language
• Prosodic features: intonation; stress; pitch; volume
• Mood signals: laughter; silence
• Highly context-bound
• Assumes shared knowledge; deictic expressions eg. over there; that one
• Phatic utterances eg. ‘How’s things?’
• Looser grammatical construction
• Errors remain: what is said cannot be ‘unsaid’
• Accent and dialect may be apparent
• Cohesion/ coherence
• May appear messy and unstructured

Features of Writing

• Decoded by the eye
• Usually planned and revised: reader sees the polished version
• No immediate feedback
• Only the language can signal tone: no prosodic or paralinguistic features
• Permanent and static
• Allows close analysis and repeated reading
• Sentences more complex, more tightly constructed; more subordinate clauses
• Avoids deictic expressions which can be ambiguous (e.g. This book)
• Graphological features
• Distance between writer and reader

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.