Semesters: 8

ECTS: 4

Form of assessment: exam

AIMS

• familiarising students with main text categories and approaches to text analysis;
• developing skills of complex linguistic analysis of literary texts.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

On successful completion of this course of study students should be able to:
• have a comprehensive knowledge of phonetic, lexical, grammatical, and word-building patterns of the foreign language;
• compare and contrast the combination of different level categories when creating the literary text;
• group and systemise linguistic expressive means, words which have different meanings, homonyms, synonyms, antonyms, phraseological expressions, dialects;
• identify hidden agenda of the text;
• use reference literature when working with literary texts.

CONTENT

Basic issues of linguistic analysis.
Objectives of the linguistic analysis of the text. Correlation of linguistic analysis and other types of text analysis. Functional characteristics of the text. Correlation between esthetic and linguistic characteristics of the text.

Text as an object of linguistic analysis.
Definition of the concept “text”. Common and different in understanding of the text by researchers. The main properties of text and factors of text building. Modern theories of text. Linguistic analysis in Russian and foreign linguistics of the 60s-80s. Correlation between the concepts text and discourse.

The main categories of text.
Information content as the main category of text. Levels of information. Factual information. Conceptual information. Modality of text and ways of its expression. Correlation of text complexity with different levels of readers’ perception. The concept of presupposition. Non-coincidence of the author’s intention with the readers’ understanding. Implication as a linguistic phenomenon. Explicit and implicit way of implying. Modality and implication.

Text segmentation. Types of text segmentation. Pragmatic and variable types of text segmentation. Segmentation units: statement, text fragment, complex syntactic unit, paragraph. Segmenting texts of different genres.

Forms and types of cohesion. Intratextual cohesion for logical connection of messages and facts. Text cohesion on different levels of the language structure. Forms and types of cohesion. Logical, associative, imagery, and stylistic cohesion.

The category of continuum in a literary text. Continuum as a grammatical category. Space and time continuum of a literary text.
The category of autosemantics. Definition. One-way and two-way cohesion. Dependence and independence of sub-text fragments.
The category of retrospection and prospection in the text. Types of prospection and its pragmatic objective. Types of its realization. Prospection as a method of narration. Author and reader types of prospection.

The category of text modality. Objective-modal meaning and subjective-modal meaning. Modality of different text types.
Integrity and text completion. Integrity of different length texts. Types of cohesion for integration.
Intertextuality and text building category. Types of intertextuality.

Functional meaningful and stylistic types of texts.
Thematic and communicative predetermined course. Types of reflecting reality in a text. Functional and stylistic characteristics of text. Functional meaningful types of speech and their correlation to composition meaningful types. Monologue and dialogue.
Functional and structural specific features of fiction literature. Devices of vertical semantic cohesion and wholeness of a literary text. Associative verbal network. Implications in literature. Author’s personality as a compositional centre of the text. Genres of texts.

Linguistic analysis of text.
Composition and speech level. Narration types. Speech forms. Analysis of the language level of text.