Levels of text analysis

Question 1

Discourse vs. Words vs. Sentences

Answer 1

• Discourse – framing a situation; a path from a beginner to an expert (in the context of the bank quiz); learning finance is like learning language, etc.
• Words – metaphors, choice of words, frequency, collocation, etc.
• Sentence – a triplet of agent, action, and object; the argument; complexity, etc.

Question 2

2 approaches of text analysis

Answer 2

1. Textual analysis

2. Text reception analysis

Question 3

Textual analysis

3 levels

Answer 3

• Lexical level – the level of lexemes (words); word frequency
• Level of sentence – the level of linguistic acts; meaning; argument
• Supra-sentential level – the level of discourse; sequence of sentences

Question 4

Text reception analysis

Answer 4

• The readers’ cooperation with texts (author’s textual strategies and reader’s reading strategies)
• How readers interact with text
• Sometimes what’s written in the smallest letters is most important
• Used to inhibit will to read it; done on purpose; not about the content but about accessibility

Question 5

The role of the reader

3 main roles

Answer 5

• The reader’s role is crucial for any text analysis because:

1. Readers assign textuality to an object
2. Readers construct intertextual, transtextual, and contextual relations
3. Readers establish the meaning of a text

• The text itself can’t assign any meaning, analysis, relationships to itself
• Authors can prepare material in a way that makes connections obvious or in ways that provoke thoughts

Question 6

Operative vs. Cooperative reading

Answer 6

• Distinguished by U.Eco

Reading requires certain competencies from the reader:

1. Reader as an Operator
   * Only a linguistic competence (grammar, lexicon) is necessary to actualize a lexemic surface of the text
2. Reader as a Co-operator
   * Linguistic, conferential and encyclopedic competencies are needed to actualize a deeper meaning of the text

• Linguistic - you need to know english
• Coreferential - need to understand lack of sense from these repeating words
• Encyclopedic - need to know reference to “to be or not to be” and that it refers to life vs death
• Qualitative analysis - co-operator
• Quantitative analysis - operator

Question 7

What’s the model reader?

Answer 7

A model reader actualizes the meaning of everything that the textual strategy (of the author) intends to say

• Model reader can read the text as the author intended it
• Should the analyst be a model reader for a text he/she analyzes?
• • A good author give signs and hints to be understood as they intended
• • Author needs to write to be understood properly

Question 8

Tony Bennet’s strategies of co-operative reading

Answer 8

• Some texts (metatext) organize reading of other texts.
• They help the reader (or prevent him from) becoming a model reader for other texts

Examples

• Micro-level – prefaces, preambles, introductions, notes, commentaries, manifests, caricatures, examples, etc.
• Macro-level – Marxism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics of suspicion, conspiracy
• Once you read a text, you will always have that knowledge behind how you analyze future texts
• Hermeneutics of suspicion - text was created to sell me something or convince me of something; readers then read with suspicion
• Conspiracy - conspiracy thinking makes you a model reader because

Question 9

Stuart Hall’s strategies of co-operative reading

Answer 9

• Reading strategies are relative to the social context of the reader’s position
• Developed for analyzing TV

Examples

• Dominant reading - the reader accepts the socially preferred mode of reading
• Negotiated reading - the reader accepts in part the preferred mode but in part reads alternatively; Some criticism
• Oppositional reading - the reader reads a text in a contrary position toward it

Question 10

Lexical level of analysis

Answer 10

What is a word?
* A word (lexeme) - elementary unit of a text that generates meaning
* A “table”
= a piece of furniture with a flat top and one or more legs, providing a level surface for eating, writing, or working at;
= a set of facts or figures systematically displayed, especially in columns.
* Even a single letter can generate meaning like “B” being the label referring to an item, and so they function as words

Question 11

Two types of words

Answer 11

1. Content words – having meaning (table, to give up, clever); mostly used in textual analysis
2. Function words – Express grammatical relationships with other words (like, a, because); rarely used in textual analysis

Question 12

Lemma

Answer 12

• The canonical form for a family of words
• Teach stands for teaches, taught, teaching
• • Proxy for analysis on the level of words
• Lemmas are important for inflected languages as Slavic languages

Question 13

Keyword

Answer 13

• A natural representation of a semantic field
• • stand for some field of meaning
• “Nano” stands for nanotechnology, nanospider, nanofiber, and other related words
• Global (for things that concern the whole earth), bio/organic, poverty, gender…
• Represent some thematic or semantic fields

Question 14

Code

Answer 14

• Most artificial replacement of words
• Constructed index for a semantic field
• Example “school” stands for all words linked to education
• • School, teacher, pupil, etc…
• Used for quantitative analysis

Question 15

What can we do with words (keywords, lemmas, etc.)?

Answer 15

1. We can count them, observe their frequency in our samples, and relate them to the (social) context
2. We can observe their occurrence in relation to their co-text (collocations, co-occurrence, and KWIC (Key Words In Context))

Question 16

Co-location

Answer 16

Some words occur together more often than randomly

• “After 9/11”, “undocumented immigrants”, “latest news”

Question 17

Co-occurrence

Answer 17

• Not just that two words are close together
• Counting how many times two or more words occur together in a determined span of a text (article, paragraph, sentence, webpage)
• Not closely related but found close together in some span of text

Question 18

Keyword-in-context (KWIC)

Answer 18

A list of co-texts of a word in the text (corpus). Helps to identify:

• • the frequent/typical use of the word
• • non-frequent use of the word
• • positive/negative tone

Question 19

Levels of a sentence

Answer 19

This is the primary difference: words pertain to language while sentences pertain to authors or speakers

We can use a dictionary for words, but there’s no dictionary for sentences
* We don’t make words but we do make sentences
* Sentences are results of our communicative intention
* They’re OUR sentences
If we don’t understand, we have to ask the person what they meant

Sociological Text Analysis uses a pragmatic mode of analysis rather than syntactic or semantic - it focuses on what people do by using sentences, (like negotiating, agreeing, convincing, attacking, harming, etc)

Question 20

Semiotics has 3 branches:

Answer 20

1. Semantics (meanings)
2. Syntactics (the combination of and relationship of symbols)
3. Use of language in society

Question 21

We can analyze sentences 3 ways:

Answer 21

1. Semantically (what do they mean?)
2. Syntactically (how are they constructed?)
3. Pragmatically (how do people use sentences to do something?) - used for T.A.

Question 22

2 models of communication

Answer 22

1. Encoding – decoding

2. Inferring

Question 23

Encoding – decoding

Answer 23

The sender wants to communicate, they encode in a message (like language), and the receiver decodes (understands)

• “How are you?”
• The classical model of communication
• Not the same as Stuart Hall’s chapter

Question 24

Inferring

Answer 24

The decoder also has to infer the meaning in addition to the language (mostly from social context - tone, body language, etc.)

• “I’m fine”
• In sociology, the communication model doesn’t work
• • We don’t know the code in which it was encoded
• • The decoder could interpret “I’m fine” in many ways
• • It’s impossible to know from just language

Question 25

Supra-sentential level

Answer 25

Meaning “the level above the sentence”

Highest level of analysis
* Focus on the context in which sentences occur or look for macrostructures (storytelling, is there a story? Just description or plot? What’s the plot? What is the point? What’s interesting about it?)

Texts have properties that can’t be explained

1. From the properties of sentences
2. In linguistic terms

Question 26

What makes words distinct from sentences? (The answer is not that sentences consist of words.)

Answer 26

Words pertain to language while sentences pertain to authors or speakers. We don’t make words, and so we can look them up in the dictionary if we don’t understand. But we do make sentences, so we have to ask the speaker for their communicative intention if we don’t understand.

Question 27

Comparing the number of occurrences of the keyword “globalisation” in newspapers with the amount of international trade for the same period of time is an example of word co-occurrence study. True or false?

Answer 27

False

Question 28

Why encoding/decoding model of communication is insufficient for the analysis of discourse (the use of language in society)?

Answer 28

The encoding and decoding model of communication doesn’t work for social science because we don’t know the code in which messages were encoded. For example, a decoder could interpret “I’m fine” in many ways and it’s impossible to know from just language. Rather, the decoder also has to infer the meaning in addition to the language (mostly from social context - like tone, body language, etc.)