Kreyer (Subject) / Session 6 (Lesson)

This lesson was created by RedoX.

Learn lesson

This lesson is not released for learning.

back  |  next 1 / 1

• Propositional Language / metalanguage concerning truth value of language In the following you see a description of an event in propositional logic. Propositions always consist of a predicate (in CAPITALS) and one or more arguments (in brackets). This is a way of representing meaning with a meta language. Let's assume the following has happened. DRIVE_AWAY(police,protesters,with rubber bullets)BE_VIOLENT(protesters)BE_AGRESSIVE(police) Try to come up with as many sentences as possible to describe this event. You do not have to express all of the semantic content. What would a conservative newspaper headline be? What a liberal one?
• Analytic tools; critical linguistics -ideological significance can be found in all linguistic structures(semantics, pragmatics, syntax, phonolgy, etc.)-critical linguistics: decoding the unconscious "patterns of believe" of a text, considering experience, knowledge and intuition - critical linguistics is particularily concerned with the ordering of experience and with the mediation of social relationships and values 
• Functions of language (according to Halliday) - Halliday proposes that all language performs simultaneously three functions, which he calls ‘ideational’, ‘interpersonal’ and ‘textual’. -ideational(~representational): a person communicates awareness of the world/own consciousness; →transitivity -interpersonal(~expression of attitude): a person communicates attitude towards this awareness of the world -textual(~creating): a person uses texts to communicate the ideational and textual functions through language
• Ideational language according to Halliday serves for the expression of content. It has a representational or as Halliday calls it; ideational function. → through this function; speaker/writer embodies in language his experience of the phenomena of the real world; and this inclusdes his experience of the internal world of his own consciousness: his reactions, cognitions, and perceptions, and also his linguistic acts of speaking and understanding
• Interpersonal language function (Halliday) serves what we may call an interpersonal function. Speaker using language as the means of his own intrusion into the speech event: the expression of his comments, attitudes, evaluiations and also the relationship he sets up between himself and his listener – in particular the communication role that he adopts of informing, questioning, greeting, persuading and the like
• Textual Function (halliday) - Third function, textual function. It is through this function that language makes links with itself and with the situation; and discourse becomes possible, because the speaker or writer can produce a text and the listener or reader can recognize one. Textual function is in turn instrumental to the 1st and 2nd function. Concerned with creating texts.
• What is transitivity? (Halliday) - Transitivity – part of the ideational function – is a fundamental and powerful semantic concept in Halliday, an essential tool in the analysis of representation, which has already proved extremly illuminating in critical linguistics. - Transitivity is the foundation of representation, it is the way the clause is used to analyze events and situations as being of certain types. And transitivity has the facility to analyze the same event in different way, a facility which is of course of great interest in newspaper analysis. - If we see something, ‘perceptually the phenomenon is all of a piece’; but when we talk of it, we must ‘analyse it as a semantic configuration’ - that is, we must represent it as one particular structure of meaning. - Since transitivity makes options available, we are alawys suppressing some possibilities, so the choice we make – better, the choice made by the discourse – indicates our point of view, is ideologically significant - Halliday uses transitivity differently than it is commonly used in grammar. There are many more distinctions of meaning behind transitivity than the simple syntactic distinction of transitive vs. intransitive expresses
• What is transitivity #2 ? “Transitivity is the foundation of representation: it is the way the clause is used to analyse events and situations as being certain types. And transitivity has the facility to analyse the same event in different ways (…) . Since transitivity makes options available we are always suppressing some possibilities, so the choice we make (…) indicates our point of view, is ideologically significant.“ (Fowler, 71) → So different speakers will describe one and the same event differently, depending on their point of view on the one hand, but on their aim and intention on the other, newspapers for example.  (Police driven away example)
• Describe the representation of events Every narration of an event contains an action, at least one agent and an affected participant (optional) as well as circumstances. Each of these leave room for manipulation, depending on your word-choice of representing the event. The way we retell an event influences how we make others, and ourselves, think of it. Compare:How fast do you think the car drove when it hit the other car?How fast do you think the car drove when it crashed into the other car?How fast do you think the cars drove when they smashed into each other? “Memory is not just recalling an action, it works constructive and reconstructive. Memory works a little like a wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. When you feed people misinformation about an experience they may have had, you can distort or change their memory. (…) You can plant false memories and they have repercussions that effect behaviour long after the memories take hold.“
• What are propositions? Proposition: smallest unit of meaning that has a truth value.  A proposition is the smallest unit of meaning that has truth-value, so it can be true or false. A proposition's truth-value depends on our knowledge of the world and on the number of additional parameters or circumstances of an utterance to be met in order for it to be true or plausible. We use predications in order to describe propositions. It is a way of representing meaning with a meta-language. → PREDICATE (arg1, arg2, …) BE_RED(car) (SCHREIBWEISE FÜR PROPOSITIONS)  BE_EXPENSIVE(car) The red car is expensive (red and expensive can be propositions) 
• Advertisement
• What kinds of syntactic transformation of the clause -syntactic ordering is significant-transformation: syntactic variation of a clause-most important: →passive transformation, →nominal transformation ransitivity analysis is a semantic perspective on the ideas expressed by a clause: we approach it as a proposition about the world, in which an event, situation, relation or attribute is predicated of some participant(s). - But a clause is also – and essentially – a basic syntactic unit, a patterned ordering of words and phrases. - Syntactic analysis is concerned with position and sequence of elements, rather than their propositional meanings and functions - Here I want to introduce the notion of transformation to refer to syntactic variation of the type that is interesting to critical linguistics, and mention two specific transformations that are particularly worth looking at in critical analysis: passive and nominal
• Describe the Passive transformation -active: left-hand position subject → passive: left-hand position patient-first position prominence, focus on patient, not on agent-agent deletion possible (leaving out responsibility) - The active is chosen when the focus is to be on the agent of the action, implying clear responsibility - The passive allows parts of the clause to be deleted (as transformational terminology puts it) - The passive constructions reorient the story so that it is now about the boy rather than his alleged killer - Passive is a common structure in headlines, saves space and immediately establishes topic
• Describe the Nominalization transformation -adjectives and verbs realized as nouns →derived nominals-often used in official, bureaucratic contexts and formal modes-participants, time and modality are deleted →concealing power-relations, writers' attitudes →potential for mystification-reification: qualities and processes obtain the status of a 'thing' English is a nominalized language → structurally possible and actually common for predicates (verbs and adjectives) to be realized syntactically as nouns. These are called derived nominals.  - Examples: Allegation is derived from allege, development is derived from develop, completion of investigation instead of complete the investigations etc. - Nominalization is a radical syntactic transformation of a clause, which has extensive structural consequences, and offers substantial ideological opportunities. - Much information goes unexpressed in a derived nominal, compared with a full clause → compare: ‘allegations’ with the fully spelt out proposition ‘X has alleged against Y that Y did A and that Y did B etc.’ → Deleted in the nominal form are the participants (who did what to whom?), any indication of time – because there is no verb to be tensed – and any indication of modality - the writer’s views as the truth or the desireabliity of the proposition.
• Lexical structure -related term clusters mark certain topics, e.g. scientific, forensic, political →different registers-registers differentiate topics socially and ideologically - Vocabulary or lexis is a major determinant of ideational structure, in Haillday’s linguistic theory.
• The interpersonal element of modality -comment or attitude-types: truth(different degrees of certainty), obligation(propositions should/ought to/ must be performed), permission(propositions may/can be performed), desirability(approval/disapproval, e.g newspaper editorials) - First clearly interpersonal feature to be mentioned is modality; modality can informally be gegarded as ‘comment’ or ‘attitude’, obviously by definition ascribable to the source of the text, and explicit or implicit in the linguistic stance taken by the speaker/writer - Four types of comment: (a) truth, (b) obligation, (c) permission, (d) desirability
• Action / process - Actions are under the control of agents: ‘struggling’ is a deliberate activity. - ‘Sinking’ in (8) however, is clearly neither deliberate nor controlled, and such verbs are better simply called processes - Actions, processes and states may be material, as most of the above: that is to say, external, physical, perceptible. Or they may be mental (decide – mental action, dream – mental process, tough – mental state) - Or they may be verbal (criticizing – verbal action, arguing – verbal process) - Politics and the law rely heavily on verbal actions and verbal processes for their operation; Debates, negotiations, submissions, court-room procedures etc. are heavily reported in the Press → Therefore there are many verbs of this kind in the newspapers
• State a situation which does not imply change in the world but is rather a simple description.  - she is pretty
• Describe Agent The one being in control over an action/ “the doer of an action”.
• Describe affected participants and what they are People and objects that have things done to them, or happen to them, called as a group → affected participants Object – most neutral description, where someone or something is affected in a material way by an action or process, and is considered as a physical entity: (20) Karen’s fiance found her body at her flat in Church Street, Southwell. (21) The top of a reactor was ripped off by a huge explosion. --> huge explosion is called a force, because it is inanimate (thus no agent) but still somewhat active.  Patient – an affected participant who/which is human or at least animate, who/which has something done to them. - The term patient is generally used to refer to the role of an affected participant who/which is human, or at least animate, and who has something done to them. - Examples: Ferret attacks toddler, Did I kill my mother?, A girl died to kepp rape secret  Result – the result of an action/process, rather than being actually changed. (= outcome)- it is one which comes into being as a result of an action or process, rather than being changed by an action or process; we may call this role result - Example: Miners are producing more coal with fewer men and are earning bigger bonuses 'Beneficiary' – encodes a positive outcome, the affected entity profits from the action/process. - people/things who benefit from something  Example: England’s troubled selectors, Miners … are earning bigger bonuses as in the other clause they are agents – not beneficiaries – Miners are producing more coal
• What is meant by circumstances? expressions indicating the time and place of the event described in the clause (28) A TOP police marksman shot a five-year-old boy through the heart [place] from nine-inch range [place] in a dawn raid [time] on his home [place] a jury was told yesterday [time]
• Ideational function Interpersonal function Textual function Ideational function: The expression of content; embodying in language the experience of phenomena of the real world Interpersonal function: The expression of the speaker’s comments, attitudes, evaluations, etc. Textual function: Enabling language to meet the demands that are made on it.
• Which function includes transitivity? Why? Ideational  Because everybody got its own ways to communicate / represent an event. (thus ideational) 

back  |  next 1 / 1