Samarkand state institute of foreign languages Faculty of Roman-German languages Chair of English philology final assessment for the 1-course master’s degree “Methods of linguistic analysis”. Card 1

Samarkand state institute of foreign languages Faculty of Roman-German languages Chair of English philology final assessment

for the 1-course master’s degree “Methods of linguistic analysis”.

CARD 1.

1. 
   What are the methods of textual analysis in linguistics?
   
2. 
   Read the following text and analyze it according to one of the linguistic methods.
   

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

3. 
   What is the main idea of statistical and verification methods and what are they for? After explaining the overview about these methods write some examples and explain which of them stands for statistical and which for verification methods?
   
4. 
   Analyze the given extract according to language layers
   

My Lords, I am not sure that we have much evidence for that particular assertion. As the noble Countess will recognize, because I think she was involved in our debates on the Welfare Reform Bill, there has been a lot of focus on helping people back into and closer to the labor market-particularly helping lone parents, most of whom are women-and on supporting them so that they can actually move into employment. If one looks at all the issues around poverty, one sees that the thing that makes the difference is people's employment opportunities.

Karim Ruziyev

Textual analysis is a methodology that involves understanding language, symbols, and/or pictures present in texts to gain information regarding how people make sense of and communicate life and life experiences. Visual, written, or spoken messages provide cues to ways through which communication may be understood. Often the messages are understood as influenced by and reflective of larger social structures. For example, messages reflect and/or may challenge historical, cultural, political, ethical contexts for which they exist. Therefore, the analyst must understand the broader social structures that influence the messages present in the text under investigation.

There are a huge range of questions we need to ask when we're approaching a text for study. Most of these questions relate to one of four areas: Mode, Discourse, Lexis, and Grammar. 

The representative discussions of text extracts given below show how some of these questions can be answered. They don't attempt to deal with every possible noteworthy feature of the text, but simply to highlight some of the features worth mentioning. They also don't, on the whole, give much analysis or discussion of the significance of the highlighted features. They are intended to guide you through the initial stages of text analysis, and to show you how you can use sets of questions to extract information from texts.

Mode

This category covers the physical appearance and presentation of a text as well as the way in which it is produced.
• Is the text primarily in the written mode, or does it represent the spoken mode? Is it handwritten or typed?
• Is the text spontaneous (a conversation, a scribbled note, an IM conversation) or planned (a lecture, an essay)?
• Are written conventions used to represent spoken features?
• Are there unconventional spellings or typographical errors in the text?

Text 1: JPod by Douglas Coupland (London: Bloomsbury, 2006) 


Discussion:
This is a written text, which represents speech and separates it from the main narrative by the use of quotation marks and, on occasions, paragraph breaks. A bold, sans-serif font is used to represent text displayed on the screen of a BlackBerry. The use of all-capitals for these words conveys urgency and highlights the text on the page. Italicisation is used in the first line to indicate the sarcastic tone in which the word is spoken. In the penultimate line, Coupland uses quotation marks to show that the words "accessible" and "fun" are not those chosen by the narrator, but rather are buzzwords towards which he has a high level of contempt. The final line uses ASCII (a form of electronic text encoding) to represent the word "edgy", ostensibly because the word is so horrendous that the narrator cannot bear even to spell it out. Since only a very small minority of readers would understand this without consulting some kind of key, this has the effect of excluding the reader somewhat, whilst marking the narrator as a member of a particularly technology-based, geeky social group.