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The information conveyed by a text may be of different kinds: content-conceptual and content-factual.
Content-conceptual information is that which reveals the formation of notions, ideas or concepts. It's not confined to merely imparting facts, descriptions, events, etc. it's not always easily discernible, may not lie on the surface of its verbal exposition. It may only be grasped after a minute examination of the constituents of the text provided that the reader has acquired the skill of supralinear analysis. It may have various interpretations and not frequently reveals divergent views as to its purpose. It may be encountered in the belles-lettres and some other functional styles, in diplomatic texts.
Content-factual informationis contained in the matter-of-fact styles, i.e. newspaper style, in the texts of official documents and in some others.
Such a division of information may emphasize the crucial difference between what is more or less clearly stated in verbal chains and what is only suggested and therefore needs mental effort to get at what is said by the unsaid.
Galperin suggests the following procedures in stylistic analysis which will facilitate the process of disclosing the kind of information contained in the given text.
1. Determining the kind of text being dealt with (taxonomic stage of analysis). There is an immediate need to get a clear idea as to what functional style this or that text belongs and what definite model of a text (e.g. the style of official documents, a memorandum).
2. Content-grasping stage aims at an approximate understanding of the content of the given text (it does not claim to be a complete and exhaustive penetration into the hidden purpose of the author).
3. Semantic procedure has as its purpose the close observation of the meanings of separate words and word combinations as well as of the significations of the various sentences and supra-phrasal units. It is advisable at this stage of analysis to consult dictionaries inasmuch as dictionaries will show the polysemy of the words, thus enabling to distinguish a simultaneous realization of two or more meanings of a word in the sentence.
4. The stylistic stage aims at finding out what additional information might be impaired by the author's use of various stylistic devices.
5. The functional stage brings us back to the second one and sets the task of investigating the conceptual information contained in the whole of the text. The previously acquired data should be assembled and a kind of synthesis of all procedures should be made.
6. The suggested sequence has proved to be the most efficient in getting a deeper insight into what constitutes the notion text.
There are various things people do when they analyze a text – or indeed analyze any discourse, spoken or written:
- An analysis of the reasoning: what is the main assertion, the reasons given, and the backing and assumptions that support those reasons? What are strengths and weaknesses of the reasoning?
- An analysis of persuasive strategies other than reasoning.
- An analysis of the voice, tone, diction, and the stance of the writer toward the reader.
- An analysis of the form, structure, organization, division into parts – and how they relate to the meaning.
- An analysis of the figurative language.
There are two main traditions in text analysis:
· Exploring what effect the text has on the reader and explaining how it achieves that effect.
· Exploring the relationship between what is said and how it's said – between the meaning and the form.
Meaning is not a matter of recognition but of realization, not a matter of what a text means, but what a text means to the reader. The very fact that the poem is dislocated from social context gives licence to readers to locate its meaning in their own individual experience. Thus people will produce diverse and divergent interpretations.
We interpret meanings out of texts. The differences of interpretations are conditioned by our particular dispositions, individual experiences of language and reality. And yet the meanings we read into texts are not independent of the texts themselves either. Interpretations must ultimately be referred back to the texts which activated them.
The position that H.G. Widdowson takes is that we neither capture nor create the world with our texts, but interact with it. We use our texts to interact with the world, both that which is socially sanctioned and that which is individually apprehended. In other words, we interpret texts into discourses in different ways.
We experience the structures of a literary text as elements of a dynamic communicative interaction between writer and reader, in which our expectations are fulfilled or frustrated. We all have different expectations and emotions, and thus the responses and our interpretation of the text as a whole, are bound to differ from reader to reader.
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