ILS1: Introduction to textual analysis Seminar 7 Activity 1: Rearrange each of the following paragraphs beloww into two coherent texts: JUMBLED TEXT 1 He had a little boat, and he rowed about quite quietly on the lake; for lake it was, wide and deep and deadly cold. Only old people go fishing. Not he. The only fish you ever catch are tiny (yet in every pond there is a giant pike big enough to swallow a swan whole). He was Gollum - as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face. Fishing may be the most popular participatory sport in the UK, but most people don't have a clue what actually goes on out there on our rivers, lakes, and seas. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was. Only old blokes go fishing. Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. It's boring. He paddled it with large feet dangling over the side, but never a ripple did he make. It's always raining. He was looking out of his pale lamplike eyes for blind fish, which he grabbed with his long fingers as quick as thinking. The average Briton has his or her fair share of preconceptions about fishing, of course. JUMBLED TEXT 2 With such a small community of speakers, the children never developed fluency. The last straw in my decision to sit down and write the book was getting back a manuscript that had been mutilated by a copy editor who, I could tell, was mindlessly enforcing rules that had been laid out in some ancient style book as if they were the Ten Commandments. However, I support the Ontario Education Act’s restriction of the language of instruction in publicly funded schools to English or French. Our heritage language suffered while we were busy trying to learn English and make a life in Canada. For all these reasons, I have long recognised the need for a style guide based on modern linguistics and cognitive science. The weekend Chinese classes we attended were taught in dialects incomprehensible to us. English eventually became our home language. The manuals written by journalists and essayists often had serviceable rules of thumb, but they were also idiosyncratic, crabby, and filled with folklore and apocrypha. While it’s unfortunate my family wasn’t better able to hold onto our heritage language, it’s great when families can. Linguistics experts, for their part, have been scathing about the illogic and ignorance in traditional advice on usage, but have been unwilling to proffer their own pointers to which rules to follow or how to use grammar effectively. My siblings and I understand rudimentary Hakka but don’t speak it. Activity 2: Read the text below and identify figures of speechs (focusing on meatphors). Identify tenor, vehicle and ground in each case. "The city was rancid, pregnant with squalor behind its immortal veil. From his room on Kurzbauergasse, Egon looked onto the boulevards for hours on end, watching the carriages roll up and back, listening to the horses’ hooves rattling off the cobblestones and onto the gravel paths, to the piercing clicks of ladies’ clicks. He looked down on the tall hats of the landed gentry and the stubby caps of workers, learning to differentiate the confident strides of the doctors from the sedate strolling of lawyers. Clerks, valets and housekeepers would rush down the street, reach for their master’s elbow, pose a question and then scurry away with the answer. In the slice of Vienna below his window, Egon learnt to know mankind in all its colours and classes." (Lewis Crofts, The Pornographer of Vienna)
1
Activity 3: Identify the deictic expressions in the following sentences: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
You'll have to bring that back tomorrow, because they aren't here now. Has she been here long? (in a restaurant) I want this dish, this dish, and this dish. The killer left that outside of this house. There is a draught here.
Activity 4: Classify the following speech acts into the five relevant classes: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
I promise to marry your sister! Madrid is the capital of Spain. Please close the door! I hereby pronounce you man and wife. Thank you for the nice present!
2