« the drawing board | Main | bibliographic & ironical »
October 19, 2006
notes about textual analysis
from Stillar's Analyzing Everyday Texts
p. 14: the overarching framework of "discoursal practice" has 3 key elements; it is "systemic," "functional," & "social." he defines systems as "organized sets of linguistic structures: the arrays of 'what can be done' in terms or selections and combinations of linguistic units" & textual function as "the organization of the language system & the interpretation of its possible structures," and explains that both are "social phenomena...in terms of their origins, contexts, and effects."
p. 15 from Halliday:
Text represents choice. A text is 'what is meant,' selected from the total set of options that constitute what can be meant. In other words, text can be defined as actualized meaning potential. (109)
basically, what text = is choice (15); what texts do is "represent" (18)--"institutional context, social experiences, temporal selection & perspectival conditions"; studying text involves studying the roles & reasons/circumstances its authors' words convey--representations of authors as authorities (28)--alongside the representations of their motivations (29).
& the stuff itself, in overview/definition: "discourse analysis interprets instances of text in relation to systems of meaning-making resources" (179)
from Pickering's A Framework for Discourse Analysis
p. 3 he establishes a "framework" rather than a "method" because methods are too rigid & depend too much on replicable situations for their application.
p. 57: style as an expression of the social; p. 59: register as an expression of the context of the situation (how are those separable?)
-->food for thought: we never treat citation practices & text-mingling/intertextuality as matters of style and/or register, but they are; they're about community membership in very specific contexts.
& the WOrld WIde WUb (or at least Daniel Chandler) says the term "intertextuality" (at least as he's using it?) is from kristeva's 1980 Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Semiotics for Beginners)
keyword "explicitness"; do i need to hang somebody's name on that?
Posted by ttobryan at October 19, 2006 11:13 AM