Riassunto esame linguistica inglese (secondo anno), libri consigliati: "Discourse analysis", Widdowson e "Translating texts from theory to practice", Ulrych

What is a text

We identify a piece of language as a text as soon as we recognize that it has been produced for a communicative purpose. It is not a simply grammatical unit, but a form of exchange, not a unit of form but of meaning; it is a dialogue, a meaning creation interaction among speakers. Whether simple or complex, all texts are uses of language which are produced with the intention to refer to something for some purpose. This intention is made explicit when a text is labelled as a notice, instructions, report, or proclamation. But recognizing a text is not the same as realizing its meaning. You may not know what is being referred to in a particular text.

In the case of simple texts like public notices, it will be a straightforward matter to match up intention with interpretation, but in the case of more complex ones, like newspaper articles, it is more problematic. A text, therefore, is basically made of meanings that, in order to be communicated, need to be encoded and expressed through a system of graphic, phonic or visual signs. So, it is a consistent semantic unit.

People produce texts to get messages across, to express ideas and beliefs, to explain something, and to get other people to do certain things or to do things in a certain way, etc. We can refer to this complex of communicative purposes as the discourse that underlies the text and motivates its production in the first place. Readers or listeners have to interpret the text as a discourse that makes sense to them. Texts in this view do not contain meaning but are used to mediate it across discourses. So, the term discourse is taken here to refer both to what a text producer meant by a text and what a text means to the receiver.

Spoken and written texts

Texts are the perceptible traces of the process of mediating a message. In conversation, these traces are typically fragmented and disappear as soon as they are produced to serve their immediate discourse purpose. So participants in spoken interaction produce and process text as they go along, and there is no need for it to be retained as a record for it to mediate their discourse. This mediation is regulated online to negotiate whatever convergence between intention and interpretation is required for the purpose.

Written texts, on the other hand, are not constructed in this way. They are typically designed and recorded unilaterally in the act of production by one of the participants, the writer, as a completed expression of the intended message, and the text is then taken up and interpreted as a separate process. The mediation is displaced and delayed, and this makes a convergence between intention and interpretation more difficult to achieve. There is also another difficulty: in speech, they make use not only of language but of paralanguage (tones of voice, varying stress, pauses, etc.) and what they say is accompanied by facial expression or gesture, as a part of a message they intend to get across.

In written communication too, how a text is given a particular shape by choice of typeface, or its arrangement on a page, may suggest significance over and above what is signified linguistically. And it may be multimodal in that the text is accompanied by and related to other modes of communication like diagrams, pictures, charts, and so on. The encoded meaning is called semantic meaning and is what is described in dictionaries and grammar books, but we always make this semantic meaning serve a pragmatic purpose.

To summarize: when people communicate with each other, they draw on the semantic resources encoded in their language to key into a context they assume to be shared so as to enact a discourse, that is, to get their message across to some second person party. The linguistic trace of this process is the text. In the case of conversation, the text is jointly produced as the discourse proceeds by overt interaction, and it typically disappears once it has served its purpose. In the case of writing, the text is unilaterally produced and remains as a permanent record. But it is still only a discourse trace, and what is meant by it has to be inferred by interpretation, and this raises the question of how far this interpretation corresponds with the intentions that informed the discourse which gave rise to the text in the first place.

Four aspects of communicative competence

• Whether and to what degree something is formally possible: something possible within a formal system is grammatical.
• Whether and to what degree something is feasible: something reasonable to say and unambiguous, e.g., "The dog chased the cat" can be rewritten into "This is the cat the dog chased."
• Whether and to what degree something is appropriate in relation to the context in which it is used: an act of communication which is pragmatically effective (appropriate in different contexts).
• Whether and to what degree something is actually performed: co-occurrence (collocations) like idioms and proverbs.

Utterance (enunciato): linguistics sometimes uses utterances to simply refer to a unit of speech under study. The corresponding unit in written language use is text.

Language functions

When we talk about functions of language, we mean the way people use language to achieve different aims and purposes. If communication is to be effective, the participants must be sure that not only the surface structure of what is being said but also the underlying force of the utterance is transmitted and interpreted correctly and appropriately by the receiver. Even the most straightforward utterances can convey a variety of functions and involve a process of interpretation on the part of the receiver of the message.

We can carry out different activities through language: agree, disagree, blame, deny, request, question, warn, etc. The ability of sentences to perform actions was first investigated by J. Austin, who noted how all utterances have some communicative force in addition to conveying meaning. He distinguished three kinds of acts that can be performed by an utterance:

• The locution: the formal, literal meaning of a well-formed, meaningful utterance.
• The illocution: the communicative force which accompanies the utterance and is the act that is performed by it.
• The perlocution: the overall effect of the utterance on the actions, thoughts, or beliefs of the addressee (reader or listener).

The three acts together make up a speech act, and a text is made up of a concatenation of speech acts, one influencing the other. The illocutionary act gives an utterance its illocutionary force; the overall aim of the discourse and the reaction it produces in the hearer is its perlocutionary force. For example, by warning someone, I may scare or alarm him or prevent him from going somewhere. By making a request, I may get him to do something.

There are also other categories that are generally accepted:

• Representatives: acts which seek to represent a state of affairs (stating, telling, insisting, etc.).
• Expressives: acts which give expression to the speaker’s mental and emotional attitude towards a state of affairs (deploring, admiring).
• Verdictives: acts which evaluate and relay judgment (assessing, estimating, etc.).
• Directives: acts which seek to influence text receivers’ behaviour (ordering, requesting, warning, prohibiting, daring).
• Commissives: acts which commit the speaker to a course of action (promising, vowing, pledging, etc.).
• Declarations: acts whose utterance performs the action involved (blessing, baptizing, dismissing).

We divided speech acts into:

• Direct speech act: grammatical form and communicative function correspond (e.g., illocutionary force).
• Indirect speech act: grammatical form and communicative function do not correspond.

Microfunctions and macrofunctions

Functions are sometimes referred to as microfunctions to distinguish them from those that encompass larger stretches of discourse - the macrofunctions (they are generalized forms of micro ones which incorporate one or more than one function within themselves). The elements that, according to Jakobson, make up any act of verbal communication and determine a different macrofunction of language are: ADDRESSER, ADDRESSEE, CONTEXT, MESSAGE, CONTACT, CODE.

• The addresser: the person who originates the message.
• The addressee: the person to whom the message is addressed.
• The context: the setting in which the communicative act takes place (e.g., social or physical context).
• The message: the form that the message takes (grammatical and lexical choices) and the information carried (the topic).
• The contact: the medium or physical channel through which the message is transmitted and it is also the physiological connection that is set up between addresser and addressee.
• The code: refers to the language system used (e.g., English, Italian, sign language, etc.).

Macrofunctions (according to Jakobson’s acts of verbal communication) are:

• Emotive: expresses the inner states and emotions of the addresser. The addresser communicates its feelings irrespective of any response on the part of the addressee. Author centred. It is oriented towards the 1st person I and is mostly expressed through the use of interjections (great!) and a personalized use of language (unusual or original imagery).
• Conative: seeks to affect the inner states and emotions of the addressee. The addresser’s