Spolding
woke me with
the noiseless efficiency of a trained housemaid.
She
drew the curtains,
placed a can with hot water in my basin.
M. A. K. Halliday focuses on the semantic aspect of the utterance
as a dominating one. His main ideas are the following. The word text
in linguistics refers to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever
length, that forms a unified whole. It may be anything from a proverb to
a whole play. A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical
unit, like a clause or a sentence, and it is not defined by its size. A text
is a semantic unit.
A text does not consist of sentences, it is realized
by sentences. A text has texture, derived from the fact that it functions
as a unity with respect to its environment. The concept of cohesion
is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning. Cohesion occurs
when the interpretations of some element in the discourse is dependent
on that of another. The one presupposes the other. Like other semantic
relations, cohesion is expressed through the stratal organization of
language. Language is a multiple coding system comprising three
levels of coding: the semantic (meanings), the lexico-grammatical
(forms), and the phonological and orthographic (expressions). In brief,
meaning is put into wording, and wording is put into sound or writing.
Within the layer (stratum) of wording there is no hard-and-fast division
between vocabulary and grammar: the more general meanings are
expressed through grammar, and the more specific meanings through
the vocabulary. Cohesion is expressed partly through the grammar and
partly through the vocabulary.
As contrasted to M. A. K. Halliday, T. A. van Dijk says that it
is the pragmatic aspect of utterances which makes the basis of every
text. Discourse is generally understood as text in social environments.
Relations between sentences in a discourse cannot be described in
semantic terms alone. The conditions imposed on connectives as
well as coherence, topic, focus, perspective, and similar notions,
also have a pragmatic base. In other words, we do not only want to
represent certain facts but at the same time we want to use a particular
textual representation. The basic idea of pragmatics is that when we
are speaking in certain contexts we also accomplish certain social
acts. Our intentions for such actions as well as the interpretations of
intentions of other speech participants are based on sets of knowledge
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