THE ATTRIBUTES OF TEXT
4. TEXT DESCRIBED AT A MICRO LEVEL
The basic units of text are words. At a more detailed level of analysis text consists of letters, which are the basic symbols of written text, and of phonemes, which are the basic sound units of spoken text. Letters and phonemes separately do not have any meaning, but they combine into small meaning units called morphemes, which form the components of which words are constructed. Words themselves combine into larger meaningful, linguistic units such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. Letters and a number of marks form the character set of electronic texts.
4.1 Phonemes and Letters
The science of phonology analyses the basic sound units of which words are composed. A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one utterance from another, The phoneme is the fundamental theoretical component of the sound system. By borrowing symbols from the Phoenicians, the ancient Greek developed the alphabet, a set of symbols (letters) that is the basis of the character set employed in Western European languages. In principle one letter represents one phoneme, which was more or less the case with the ancient Greek alphabet (Halliday, 1989, p. 22 ff. ).
During history of mankind, languages evolved (dialects and borrowings from other languages), and written language nowadays only approaches the phonetic sounds, and the one to one correspondence between spelling and sounds is often lost. For instance, it is possible for the same letter to represent different sounds. The letters (a-z) can be capitalized (A-Z).
Capitalized letters usually have a specific function (Halliday, 1989, p. 33).
4.2 Morphemes
Morphology is the study of the structure of words and describes how words are formed from prefixes, suffixes, and other components. The components of words are called morphemes1 (Ellis, 1992, p. 33 ff. ; Allen,
1995, p. 23; Dean et al., 1995, p. 490). A word consists of a rootform ( stem or base word) and possibly of additional affixes. For instance, the word
“friend” is considered as the root of the adjectives “friendly” and
“unfriendly”. The adjectives are constructed by adding the suffix “ly” to the root and “unfriendly “ is constructed by an extra addition of the prefix“un”.
A more complicated construction concerns the derivation of the noun
“friendliness” from the adjective form “friendly”.
Morphemes are the components of language to which a meaning is associated.2The root comprises the essential meaning of a word. The root is a free morpheme, because it may occur in isolation and cannot be divided into smaller meaning units. An affix is called a bound morpheme, because it must be attached to another meaning unit. There are two classes of bound morphemes. Inflectional morphemes do not modify the grammatical category of the base word (e.g., noun) into another category, but signal
changes in, for instance, number, person, gender, and tense. Derivational morphemes do modify the category of the base word (e.g., “friendly”: the derivation of an adjective from a noun). Morphemes can change forms (e.g., the past-morpheme making “ran” out of “run”). The construction of words from morphemes is rule governed. The rules are language-dependent.
4.3 Words
A word is the most basic unit of linguistic structure. A word in written text consists of a string of characters and is delimited by white space or blank characters (possibly in combination with punctuation marks). The words of the text make up the vocabulary of the text.
Words are divided into categories, often called word classes orparts-of- speech (Allen, 1995, p. 23 ff.). This categorization is motivated by the evidence that depending upon its category a word differently contributes to the meaning of a phrase or is a distinct component of a syntactic structure.
According to its class, a word may refer to a person or an object, to an action, state, event, situation, or to properties and qualities. For instance, words of the class noun identify the basic type of object, concept, or place being discussed, and the class adjective contains these words that further qualify the object, concept, or place. Secondly, according to their class, words are specific components of syntactic structures. For instance, an adjective and a noun may be combined into the syntactic structure noun phrase. A word may belong to different categories (e.g., “play” is a noun or a verb).
Some word classes contain words that are better indicators of the content of a text, while other classes contain words that have more strongly pronounced functional properties in the syntactic structures in which they play a role. In this respect a distinction is made between content and function words (Halliday, 1989, p. 63 ff.; Dean et al., 1995, p. 491 ff.). Content words serve to identify objects, relationships, properties, actions, and events in the world. Usually, four important classes of content words are considered.
Nouns describe classes of objects, events, or substances. Adjectives describe properties of objects. Verbs describe relationships between objects, activities, and occurrences. Here, temporality and aspect of the verb play an important role in shaping the semantic expression of an utterance (Grosz &
Sidner, 1986; Dorfmüller-Karpusa, 1988). Adverbs describe properties of relationships or other properties (e.g., “very”). Function words serve a more structural role in putting words together to form sentences. They tend to define how content words are to be used in the sentence, and how they relate to each other. They are lexical devices that serve grammatical purposes and
do not refer to objects or concepts of the world. A function word is often small, consisting of only a few letters3, and its frequency of occurrence in text is usually much higher than the frequency of occurrence of a content word.4Function words belong to syntactic classes such as articles, pronouns, particles, and prepositions. The following four classes of function words are often distinguished. Determiners indicate that a specific object is being identified (e.g., “a”, “that”). Quantifiers indicate how many of a set of objects are being identified (e.g., “many”). Prepositions signal a specific relationship between phrases (e.g., “through”). Connectives indicate the relationships between sentences and phrases (“and”, “but”).
A word has a meaning or sense, which is known as lexical meaning (Ellis, 1992, p. 38). The lexical meaning or semantics of words concerns what words symbolize including their denotations and connotations. The origins and usage of words in certain text contexts define lexical meaning.
Dictionaries document the different meanings of words. The meaning of a word in a text is not always clear-cut, as it is illustrated by the following.
1. A word can have more than one meaning (e.g., the word “sentence” can refer to a text sentence, to a court sentence, and to the act of sentencing).
The multiple meanings of one word are known as homonymy and polysemy (Krovetz & Croft, 1992). In written text a homonymis a word that is spelt in the same way (i.e., homograph) as another word with an unrelated meaning. Homonyms are derived from different original words.
One speaks of polysemy when a word has different, related meanings.
The “bark of a dog” versus the “bark of a tree” is an example of homonymy; “opening a door” versus “opening a book” is an example of polysemy. Sometimes, a word does not only belong to different word classes, each of them pointing to a group of possible word senses, within the word class the word can still have different distinct meanings. When words with multiple meanings occur in phrases or sentences, they often only have a single sense, since the words of the phrase or sentence mutually constrain each other’s possible interpretations.
2. Different words can have the same meaning (e.g., “vermin” and “pests”), which is known as synonymy. Often, different words or phrasal combinations of words express the same concept. Near synonyms are words with a closely related meaning (e.g., “information” and “data”).
Also, one word can generalize or specify the meaning of the other word (e.g., the word “apple” specifies the word “fruit”).
3. An author has great freedom in the choice of words and can even make up new words or change the meaning of familiar ones. So, a word or a combination of words can be used metaphorically and have a figurative
interpretation in order to create an aesthetic, rhetorical or emotive effect (Scholz, 1988). The use of metaphorsis almost unlimited. No dictionary can answer all figurative uses of a word or of a combination of words.
4. A word can refer to another word in the text for interpretation.
Anaphora5are textual elements that refer to other textual elements with more fully descriptive phrasing found earlier in the text (called correlates) and that share the meaning of the correlates (Halliday &
Hasan, 1976, p. 14 ff.; Liddy, 1990) (e.g., the words “it “ and “his” in
“The student buys the book and gives it to his sister.”). Anaphora are used quite naturally and frequently in both written and oral communication to avoid excessive repetition of terms and to improve the cohesiveness of the text. A cataphoric reference is a word that refers to another word further in the text (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 56 ff.). It is also worth mentioning that a word or some words can be omitted from the text. This is calledellipsis(e.g., “David hit the ball, and the ball (hit) me.”) (Allen, 1995, p. 449 ff.).
4.4 Phrases
Words combine into phrases. A phrase consists of a head and optional remaining words that specify the head word (Halliday, 1989, p. 69 ff.; Dean et al., 1995, p. 492 ff.). The head of the phrase indicates the type of thing, activity, or quality that the phrase describes. The remaining words are called prehead modifiers, posthead modifiers, and complementsaccording to their
location in the phrase. Modifiers and complements can form phrases themselves. Complements are the phrases that immediately follow the head word. For instance, the phrase “this picture of Peter over here” consists of a prehead modifier “this”, a head “picture”, a complement “of Peter” and a posthead modifier “over here”.
The four classes of content words provide the head words of four broad classes of phrases: noun phrases, adjective phrases, verb phrases, and adverbial phrases (Allen, 1995, p. 24 ff.). A fifth class of phrases is built with a preposition and a noun phrase.
1. Noun phrases are used to refer to concepts such as objects, places, qualities, and persons. The simplest noun phrase consists of a single pronoun (e.g., “she”, and “me”). A proper name forms another basic noun phrase, consisting of one or multiple words that appear in capitalized form in many Western European languages (e.g., Los Angeles). The remaining forms of noun phrases consist of a head word, and possibly of other words that qualify or specify the head.
2. An adjective phrase can be a component of a noun phrase, when it modifies the head noun. It also occurs as the complement of certain verbs (e.g., “heavy” in “it looks heavy”). More complex forms of adjective phrases include qualifiers preceding the adjective (e.g., “terribly” in
“terribly dangerous”) as well as complements after the adjective (“to drive” in “dangerous to drive”).
3. A verb group consists of a head verb plus optional auxiliary verbs.
Auxiliary verbs and the forms of the head verb combine in certain ways to form different tenses, aspects, and active and passive forms (e.g., “has walked”, “is walking”, and “was seen”). Some verb forms are constructed from a verb and an additional word called a particle (e.g.,
“out” in “look out”). A verb phrase consists of a verb form and optional modifiers and complements. Verb phrases can become quite elaborated consisting of several composing phrases (e.g., “gave the sentence to the accused without hesitation”).
4. Anadverb phrase consists of a head adverb and possible modifiers (e.g.,
“too quickly”).
5. The term prepositional phrase is used for a preposition followed by a noun phrase, which is called the object of the preposition (e.g., “from the court”). Also other forms of prepositional phrases are possibly (e.g., “out of jail”). Prepositional phrases are often used as complements and modifiers of verb phrases.
Phrases usually form the components of which sentences are built.
Isolated phrases (e.g., noun phrases) can be found, for instance, in the headings, subheadings, and figure captions of texts.
Phrases are less ambiguous in meaning than the individual words of which they are composed. But, this is no general rule.
4.5 Sentences
Sentences are used to assert, query, command, or bring about some partial description of the world. The sentence is organized in such a way as to minimize the communicative effort of the user of the text. A sentence is composed of a topicand of additions (comment) to the topic (e.g., properties of the topic, relationships with other items, modifications of the topic) (Halicová & Sgall, 1988; Tomlin, Forrest, Pu, & Kim, 1997). The additions to the topic are often called the focus of the sentence. For instance, in very simple English sentences the topic is identical with the subject of the sentence and the focus with the predicate. The terms "theme"and "rheme"
are often used as a synonym for respectively topic and focus (Halicová &
Sgall, 1988).6 The theme is the starting point of the utterance, the object or person about which or whom something will be communicated and the rheme is the new information predicated of the theme (Halliday, 1976; Fries,
1994). The transitional element between theme and rheme is usually a verb, carrying some new information in the sentence, but to a lower degree than the rheme.
An utterance is structurally composed of a topic and a comment of that topic. This structure is closely connected to the way we orally communicate (Halicová & Sgall, 1988). This “deep” structure is considered as being common to all languages. It is coded into a sentence according to the grammatical rules of the language used (cf. Chomsky, 1975; Ellis, 1992, p.
36). A sentence has asyntactic structure (Dean et al., 1995, p. 490). It is composed of constituents (phrase classes) that combine in regular ways. In its turn, a phrase is composed of word classes that also combine in regular ways. So, any sentence can be decomposed or altered by the application of certain rules. The structures allowable in the language are formally specified by agrammar. The grammar allows decomposing a sentence into phrases of a specific class, which in their turn can be decomposed into words of a specific class. For instance, the sentence (S) “The judge buried the case”
consists of an initial noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP). The noun phrase is made of an article (ART) “The” and a common noun (NOUN)
“judge”. The verb phrase is composed of a verb (VERB) “buried” and a noun phrase (NP), which contains an article (ART) “the” and a common noun (NOUN) “case”. We can define the following set of rules that define the syntactic structure.
Based on the grammatical rules, we can produce an unlimited number of sentences and any sentence can be modified and lengthened by adding an infinite number of adjectives and relative clauses (cf. Chomsky, 1975).
The representation of the content of a sentence is called a proposition (Allen, 1995, p. 234). A proposition is formed from a predicate followed by an appropriate number of terms to serve as its arguments. “The judge buried the case” can be represented by the proposition (BURY JUDGE CASE). In this proposition the verb BURY has two arguments JUDGE and CASE.
Sentences are usually less ambiguous in meaning than the phrases and individual words they are composed of. The lexical ambiguity of individual
<S> ::= <NP> <VP>
<NP> ::= <ART> <NOUN>
<VP> ::= <VERB> <NP>
words is often resolved by considering the meaning of the other sentence constituents. Besides unresolved lexical ambiguity, ambiguity in sentence meaning possibly is the result of structural ambiguity (cf. Ellis, 1992, p. 38), when the syntactic structure of a sentence that contributes to the meaning of the sentence is ambiguous (e.g., the sentence “I saw the man with the binoculars”). The meaning of an ambiguous sentence can be disambiguated when considering the meaning of surrounding text sentences.
4.6 Clauses
Complex sentences can be built from smaller sentences by allowing one sentence to include another as subclause (Allen, 1995, p. 31 ff.). Common used forms are embedded sentences as noun phrases (e.g., “To go to jail ...”) and relative clauses of noun phrases (“... who sentenced the man”). The former form involves slight modifications to the sentence structure to mark the phrase as noun phrase, but otherwise the phrase is identical to a sentence.
The latter form is often introduced by a relative pronoun (e.g., “who”,
“that”). A relative clause has the same structure as a regular sentence except that one noun phrase (e.g., in subject position, object position, object to a preposition) is missing.
Regarding the topic structure, main clauses generally foreground topics, whereas subordinate clauses generally background them.
4.7 Marks
The uses of special symbols that mark up written text have been developed throughout the centuries (Halliday, 1989, p. 32 ff.). The marks or symbols help the user of the text to correctly analyze the text. They have three kinds of functions. A first function is boundary marking. For instance, punctuation marks are used to mark off sentences or clauses. Another example is the blank character that delimits words and that is used in texts electronically stored. A second function is status marking indicating a speech function. For instance, an interrogation mark refers to a question, and quotation marks refer to quoted speech. A third function is relation marking.
Special symbols indicate linkages, interpolations, and omissions (e.g., hyphen, parenthesis, apostrophe). Besides these special symbols, current texts contain characters that code specific concepts, such as the dollar, the percentage character, and digit characters to write numbers in their digital form.
So, the character set of written texts includes, besides letters and digits, a number of punctuation marks and special characters (e.g., ‘,’, ‘+’, ‘%’), and
several white space or blank characters in texts electronically stored (e.g., as word delimiters) (cf. Lebart, Salem, & Berry, 1997, p. 37). Although we do not discuss layout characteristics, special layout characteristics (e.g. the use of underlining, characters in larger font, italic and bold character forms) can stress some words or phrases of the text.