Inglese 5 appunti

PRAGMATICS

study of the language and focuses on the effects of context on meaning.

• DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: Studies written and spoken language in relation to its social context. They both study:

• CONTEXT: is the time and the place in which the words are said.
• Text: is the use of language. In fact, if the text is meaningful and unified, there is a coherence or relevance.
• Purpose: is the purpose of the speaker in speaking.

We know 3 types of context:

1. SITUATIONAL CONTEXT: refers to what speakers know of the environment around them.
2. BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE CONTEXT: is the cultural knowledge or what people know about the world. It is information that is used from memory. We can have:
   • A cultural general knowledge
   • An interpersonal knowledge
3. COTEXTUAL CONTEXT: is the context of the text. It is formed by all words that surround a word we are referring to in the text.
   • Ex: The house was empty when I arrived. 'I' is the subject and the other words are co-text.

DEIXIS

It helps us to understand what/when/where something is happening. There are 3 types of deixes:

1. PERSON DEIXES: It uses person pronouns.
2. PLACE DEIXES: Refers to a location. In fact, we use demonstratives (this, that) and adverbs like (here or there).
3. TIME DEIXES: It points to time.

An act in which the speakers use a linguistic form to make the reader focus on something

Used to identify an entity

Exophoric reference: Refers to something outside the discourse.

Endophoric reference: Refers something inside the text.

There are 2 types of endophora:

• Anaphora: Refers to an entity mentioned before in the co-text
• Cataphora: An entity that is mentioned forward in the co-text

For the endophora we have also:

• Substitution: It's a repetition of the same words in a text.
• Ellipsis: Omits part of the discourse that the readers already know for avoiding repetitions.

Grammatical cohesion: It's an expression linked to another in the co-text

Cohesion vs Lexical Cohesion

It's a relation between sentences through:

• Repetition: Repeating a word or phrase in separate times.
• Synonyms: It's a same word used by speaker.
• Superordinates: It isn't a synonym but a general word of terms (general terms)
• General words: Superordinates

Speech Acts: Is one of the most important area of pragmatics.

We can analyse 3 levels:

• Locutionary act: We try the act of saying something in particular what is said.
• Illocutionary force: What the speaker is doing with the words, in fact, making a request or giving/asking an order.
• Perlocutionary effect: The effects of the words on the readers.

Talk

1. Transactional function: it expresses content and gives a piece of information to a person
2. Interactional function: it expresses social relationships and personal attitudes (e.g. solidarity)

When we analyse discourse we can use:

• Exchange structure promoted by Sinclair and Coulthard in which a conversation follows a rigid scheme with 5 levels of structure:
  1. Act
  2. Move
  3. Exchange
  4. Transaction
  5. Lesson

IRF is a pattern of discussion between the teacher and learner.

This approach to the exchange of information in the classroom nowadays has limits because today the way of teaching is less dogmatic than before because the students work in a group.

Conversation analysis: Cook speaks about a conversation where there aren't practical tasks, when any unequal power of participants is suspended, and when the participants are few, so there are short turns.

A conversation means turn-taking when the speakers take turn one at the time to say something. While when there are more speakers, the change between 2 speakers is known as TRP (Transition Relevance Place) where there's one between the Adjacency pair.

Adjacency pairs: when the utterance of a speaker makes a specific response by another speaker (question/answer), these are parts of pairs.

Also, HELEN SPENCER-OATEY speaks about FACE but she distinguished IDENTITY from FACE. For her there are 3 types of FACE. _{related to} ^individual _{is relational}

1. QUALITY FACE -> face of our qualities or our competence
2. SOCIAL IDENTITY FACE -> for ex. the values that we claim for ourselves
3. RELATION FACE: relationship between others

Writing is used to:

• Express the ideas
• Support the ideas
• Show and support the theses
• Demonstrate knowledge based on reading and other academic experiences

We can have different types of writing for example:

• Lab report -> for describing the research
• Field study report -> describe the academic research
• Power Point -> for summarizing the contents
• Wiki -> is a collaborative website
• Blog -> is an online space where we can speak about different ideas like food, hobbies
• Extended essay -> written exam after a course
• Dissertation -> is the final work students when they finish the university
• Thesis -> final work for a doctoral level
• Report -> mess upon a topic
• Case Study -> describes the development of a detailed information over a period (ex. Literature)

The phases for writing a paper are:

1. Planning: decide a topic, check the sources, think a title and try to establish a clear focus.
2. Researching: go to the library or use internet, read everything you have found and if you have doubts do more researches.
3. Writing up: write the first draft, don't work alone but find someone that would read your paper. After this including bibliography or abstracts.

Finally you have: introduction, main body and conclusion.

Syntax is the rules of a language. We have a rank scale formed by:

• Sentence
• Clause
• Phrase
• Word
• Morpheme

Then we can distinguish also the 4 basics of a clause:

• Subject
• Predicator
• Complement
• Adjunct

After we have meter - the repetition to the alteration between accented syllables and weak syllables.

Rhythm - the alteration of syllables.

Narrative Style:

In Stylistics we have 2 types of narrative:

• Narrative Plot - is the abstract storyline.
• Narrative Discourse - represents the storyline.

There are 6 basic units of narrative stylistics:

1. Textual medium
2. Sociolinguistic code
3. Actions and events
4. Points of view
5. Textual structure
6. Intentionality

They are important because there are different types of narrative text:

• First Person - is the character-narrator who participates in the story.
• Third Person - is an invisible narrator but whose "omniscience" we can also have restricted omniscience, who is external to the actions of the story.

There is also a distinction between:

• Heterodiegetic Narrator - is the omniscient narrator who tells the story in the third person. He is a reflector of fiction.
• Homodiegetic Narrator - is in the first person, so he is internal to the narrative.

About the level of language we have:

• Deixis - is a speaking voice in a physical space.
• Adjunct - express location and spatial relationship.

Deixis is derived from Greek and means "pointing" because it is the use of linguistic expressions that are in spatio-temporal discourse and context. Origo is the deictic center in which the object is in the proximity or distance from the reference.

Deixis can be encoded in deictic terms + deictic elements.