Suggestions toward Some Discourse analytic Approaches to Text Difficulty: With Special Reference to 'T unit Configuration' in the Textual Unfolding
A R T I C L E S U M M A R Y Content list available at www.urmia.ac.ir/ijltr Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 10.30466/ijltr.2015.20399 2 K. Lotfipour Saedi/Suggestions toward some Introduction Formulating our location in relation to the jargon: Register, Genre, Style, and Discourse analysis Texts we encounter in our everyday life vary from one another in many different respects, for example, poetry, fiction prose, newspaper articles, public speeches, parliamentary question time talks, courtroom language, classroom talk, academic papers, lab reports, billboards statistics, funeral eulogies, sermons, wedding ceremony, personal letters, business letters, degree award ceremonies, family dinner table conversation, and many others. These varieties come about thanks to variations in the choices from both lexico grammar and para language. But despite sharing the same resources, the variations fall under different perspectives of register, genre and style. Adopting an SFG (Systemic functional Grammar) outlook, these terms can be defined in the following way. Register: Any piece of text would, naturally, represent a context of situation and context of culture. Any choice made in the textualization process can be argued to represent the ethnographic features of the given context; and any, even minor, variation in these ethnographic features will be reflected in the textual choices. Register refers to this aspect of textual variation; the study of the relationship between the choices made in the textual presentation of a message and the factors involved in the ethnographic description of the related context being called register analysis. For example, the lexico grammatical choices made in composing a personal letter as opposed to a business letter can be related to the relationship between the addressor and addressee and the degree of intimacy between them among many other factors. Genre: Like register, genre is a perspective motivated by the communicative purpose and factors in the context of situation; but unlike register, it is constituted by conventional structure of the text not by lexico grammatical variations. While a register materializes through certain choices from the lexical and grammatical resources scattered around a text, a genre comes into existence through adherence to certain conventional super structures belonging to a whole text. For example, the way personal letters open and end; the overall structure of academic papers and the way they are segmented into sub sections and different moves each segment can consist of all belong to generic variations. Genre analysis is the study of generic variations. Style: Like register, style perspective defines a textual orientation through lexico grammatical choices. But while the choices in register, as noted above, are motivated by changes in the context of situation and communication goals, stylistic choices opted for are never contextmotivated. They rather "reflect aesthetic preferences, associated with particular authors or historical periods." (Biber&Conrad 2009, p. 2) For example, a rhyming pattern, a grammatical parallelism or a semantic pattern such as a metaphor employed in a literary text cannot be motivated by the context. This does not, of course, mean that the special patterns in literature texts lack any function. For discussions on the function of the special patterns in literature cf. Leech (1970) Halliday (2002) Hasan (1985) Butt (1984) and Lotfipoursaedi (2008) Style analysis or rather stylistics is the study of the special patterns mainly in literature text. Discourse: The terms 'discourse' and 'text' have been variously defined. 'Discourse' has been used to refer to 'spoken language' 'language structure beyond sentence' 'language in use' 'language in action' 'language in context' etc. (cf. Stubbs, 1983; Yule Brown, 1983) and 'text' has been used to refer to the 'stretch of language beyond sentence' and 'one or more sentences containing a whole meaning' Some authors have used the terms 'discourse' and 'text' interchangeably (Halliday 1985) But some others use the term 'discourse' to refer to the 'pre textual process of language production' and reserve the term 'text' to refer to the final 'product' which manifests the discourse process (cf. Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 3(1) (Jan. 2015) 1 18 3 Widdowson, 1984, 2004) Following Widdowson, we use 'discourse' to refer to the pre textual process of thinking and 'text' to the surface manifestation of the discourse process. Discourse analysis: 'Discourse analysis' can, naturally, mean analysis of 'discourse' in any of the above senses of the term. But to be able to present a definition with the capacity to accommodate the 'ever evolving' sense of the term 'discourse' I would like to stick to the definition formulated before (cf. Lotfipour Saedi, 2008) Here, having presented an evolutionary history of the approaches to the study of language, and going through various approaches, starting with traditional approaches, structuralism, generativism, Chomskyan concept of linguistic competence, which excluded all the situational and contextual factors (Chomsky 1965) and the trends thereafter, which have ever since been vehemently trying to broaden the domain of this 'competence' (cf. Austin, 1962; Searle 1969 Hymes, 1972 Schegloffe,1972; Canale Swales, 1980; Bachman, 1991) the term 'discourse' was chosen to refer to this concept of language in its ever widening dimensions as opposed to 'language' which, prior to this socio pragmatic surge, was used as a default term to refer to both the medium and the users' ability to use it in their everyday communication, not exceeding beyond the lexico grammatical and phonological dimensions, of course. 'Linguistics' was the term introduced in early 20th century to refer to the study of 'language' in its lexico grammatical and narrow sense replacing the term 'grammar' traditionally used for this purpose. Along this line of thinking, with 'discourse' suggested to be used to refer to language in its widest dimensions, 'discourse analysis' was used to refer to the study of language and language ability encompassing all its aspects and dimensions (cf. Lotfipour Saedi, 2008) Discourse analysis, defined as such, would, thus, be seen as an umbrella term including textlinguistics, conversation analysis, pragmatic analysis, register analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, Duality of language functions (coreand meta Language or textual functions have been discussed by many scholars under variously labeled and almost similarly defined dual types: 'representative vs. expressive' (Buhler,1934) 'referential vs. emotive' (Jakobson,1960) 'descriptive vs. social' (Lyons,1977) 'conceptual vs. interactive' (Widdowson,1984) 'transactional vs. interactional' (Brown Yule,1983) and 'ideational vs. interpersonal and textual' (Halliday, 1985) In all these dual functions, one is considered as the 'core' and the other as 'supportive' Despite their differences, since they are highly intertwined into one another lately some authors have chosen to add the prefix 'meta to core function in order to refer to the supportive one 'meta function' Crismore (1989) for example, has used meta discourse to refer to the supportive discourse functions. Following Widdowson (1984) as noted above, to use 'discourse' and 'text' to refer to 'the pre textual process' and 'the surface manifestation of that process' respectively, we have talked of discourse vs. meta discourse and text vs. meta text and have defined these meta functions accordingly (cf. Lotfipoursaedi 2005) 'Meta discourse' is used to refer to strategies which target the discursive process of negotiating a message and which are employed to guarantee a smooth running of the discourse; and 'meta text' is used to refer to strategies which are employed to guarantee an orderly presentation of the textual indices. (Lotfipoursaedi, 2005 p.6) In that study, meta discourse strategies were classified into three categories on the basis of their functions: cognitive, interpersonal and interactional each with its own specific sub categories and meta textual strategies are categorized into cohesive ties T unit demarcation decisions, organization announcers paralinguistic decisions inter textual markers and generic conventions. For further discussion and examples of each of these meta strategies see Lotfipour Saedi (2005) 4 K. Lotfipour Saedi/Suggestions toward some In discourse analytic approaches to language, any variation in a text, whether in the core or metacomponents, is considered to be 'motivated' and studies under these approaches aim at making explorations in the relations between those variations and their motivating factors. The variations manifest themselves mostly in the lexico grammar choices; and it is in this sense that grammar is seen by systemic functional grammarians as a 'theory of human experience, playing an essential role in construing human experience into meaning' (cf. Halliday, 1994; Halliday Matthissen, 1999) Such studies can offer varying types of implications including shedding light on why the texts are the way they are, the reading and writing processes, why the same language user may experience more less difficulty in performing definite reading writing tasks relative to others, and how language teacher education as well as effective language pedagogy programs can be designed addressing such issues. In the present paper, some aspects of such text variations will be examined with special reference to academic texts. Text types and textual strategies Texts, as noted above, represent their underlying context; and they vary in response to any variation in their contextual factors, communication goals and any element in the composition of their respective ethnography of communication