Lecture 4 The Principles of Text Analysis
Key words: semiotics, sign, semantics, syntactics, pragmatics.
There are different approaches and techniques of linguistic analysis of the text. One approach is the linguosemiotic analysis of the text. What does it mean?
Language units are signs. There are other signs-gestures, pictures, etc. All signs are studied by such science as semiotics. Linguistic semiotics studies language units as signs.
The principles of semiotics were laid out by the British scientist Charles Morris. Morris divided semiotics into three parts: semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. Morris defined these part in the following way: semantics studies the relation of signs to objects, syntactics investigates the relations between signs, pragmatics studies the relation of signs to interpreters.
From linguistic point of view semantics studies the meanings of language units, syntactics – types of combinations of language units and their syntactical positions, and pragmatics investigates the aim of the utterance (text) and its pragmatic effect. In pragmatics the semantic formula “the text means” is replaced by the formula “the speaker means”. So pragmatics reflects the author’s attitude to reality, to what she (he) describes (e.g. positive, negative or humorous, ironic attitude) as well as the reader’s attitude to the text (as objective, real or unreal).
These three aspects of linguosemiotics should be investigated not separately, but, on the contrary, we should analyze how one aspect is revealed through two other aspects and how one of these aspects helps to reveal the peculiarities of other aspects. So the comprehensive approach to text analysis should be applied.
Semantics
We should begin analyzing text semantics from the first strong position – the title. It is necessary to investigate what the title means, how prospection is realized in the title, what semantic type the title belongs to. After that another strong position is analyzed – the beginning (or the epigraph). The interpreter should formulate the theme of the text, the time and place where the story takes place, the main characters. Actually it is necessary to state what (who) is described in the text.
After this introduction the interpreter should investigate lexical and stylistic aspects of language units. Lexical aspect can be analyzed from the viewpoint of semantic fields (or thematic groups) like “Nature”, “Technology”; etc. It can help make the analysis more objective. Statistic data should also be included. Special attention must be paid to words which are “disproportionally frequently used in the text” (M.Toolan). Such words (word combinations, or even sentences) are certain signals to the reader about their importance to the author.
Secondly, stylistically coloured lexical units should be investigated, such as archaic words, foreign words, colloquial or vulgar words, idioms, etc.
Thirdly, the use of tropes should be paid special attention to. It concerns every type of the text, but especially fiction. Tropes can be described in two ways. 1) They may be characterized on the basis of the traditional classification – metaphors, then similes, then epithets, hyperboles and so on. 2) Or the tropes in the text can be characterized and classified with the help of the semantic principle, what and how they describe, e.g. nature (E.Hemingway, “On the American Dead in Spain”) or human appearance (D.Thomas “A Story”).
Besides tropes, phonosemantic aspect should be considered, especially when we deal with advertising or poetic texts. Phonosemantic unity is sometimes very important and can be created by means of sound repetitions or paronymy, as in With Canon you can or He was … too big for everything except the great black boats of his boots (D.Thomas).
And the fifth aspect is grammatical semantics which is often ignored. However, the use of certain tenses, the author’s preference to some grammar tense or the redundant use of it reveals an important idea, as in the abovementioned essay by E.Hemingway or the poem “On a Tired Housewife” (see below).