7. Semantic and syntactic valency of words

The arguments accompanying a verb can be described from different angles:

• Semantically (according to their meaning: giver, receiver)

• Syntactically (according to their function in the sentence: subject/object/adv.modif)

The combining power of words in relation to other words in syntactically subordinate positions is called their syntactic valency.

2 types of syn.val.:

• Obligatory

• Optional

The obligatory valency must necessarily be realized for the sake of gram. completion of the syntactic construction.

(The subject & the direct object are obligatory parts of a sentence.)

From the point of view the sentence structure they are obligatory valency partners of the verb.

The subjective & the direct objective valences of the verb are obligatory.

The optional valency may or may not be realized depending on the concrete information to be conveyed in an utterance.

The adverbial valency of the verb is mostly optional.

Semantic relations were introduced in generative grammar during the mid-1960 and early 1970s.

A semantic role is underlying relationship that a participant has with the main verb in a clause.

John read a magazine. John is doer (agent), magazine – patient.

Major semantic roles:

Agent;

Patient;

Theme;

Experience;

Goal;

Benefactive;

Source;

Instrument;

Locative;

Force & natural cause;

Recipient;

Time;

Manner;

Purpose;

Cause.

The semantic roles must often embodied by the grammatical relations of subject, object & indirect object in languages; agent, instrument, force, patient etc. are more likely to be embodied in phrases & adverbials.

8. Lexical and grammatical valency of words.

The aptness (способность) of a word to appear in various combinations is described as its lexical valency. “To raise” & ‘to lift’ are synonyms, but only ‘to raise’ is collocated with the noun “question”.

Words habitually collocated in speech tend to form a cliché.

The lexical valency of correlative words in different languages is not identical e.g. English & Russian.

Words are also used in grammatical context.

The minimal grammatical context, in which the words are used to form word-groups, is usually described as a pattern of the word-group.

The adjective is followed by a noun.

The aptness of a word to appear in specific grammatical structures is termed grammatical valency.

The gram. valency is delimited by the part of speech the word belongs to.

No English adjective can be followed by a finite verb.

The gram. valency is also delimited by the inner structure of the language.

9. Reduction and expansion of valency. Optional and obligatory valency. Secondary valency.

Verb can sometimes undergo reduction.

‘To eat’ is naturally divalent, as in ‘he eats an apple’, but may be reduced to monovalency in ‘he eats’. This is called valency reduction.

Verbs that are usually monovalent, like ‘to sleep’ cannot take a direct object. However, there are cases where the valency of such verbs can be expanded, for instance in ‘he sleeps sleep of death’ – valency expansion.

2 types of syn.val.:

• Obligatory

• Optional

The obligatory valency must necessarily be realized for the sake of gram. completion of the syntactic construction.

(The subject & the direct object are obligatory parts of a sentence.)

From the point of view the sentence structure they are obligatory valency partners of the verb.

The subjective & the direct objective valences of the verb are obligatory.

The optional valency may or may not be realized depending on the concrete information to be conveyed in an utterance.

The adverbial valency of the verb is mostly optional.

Secondary valency. Because verbs predicates are main constituents of a clause, verb balancy is primary.

Some adjectives & nouns also have the capacity to combine with other constituents of the sentence. This valency is called secondary valency.

E.g. “glass, basket, cup” could be considered to open one valency place: in the meaning of a container these words have an obligatory slot for material, in the meaning of an object the mentioned words have an empty valency frame.

‘Nervous, proud, helpless’ do not open any valency pace if they are regarded as an absolute quality as in the following examples: ‘He is a proud person. My mom is nervous.’ In other contexts they may have valency complements: ‘Father is proud of his daughter. He is nervous because of the exams.’

10) TEXT for Halliday and Hasan (1976) T. used in linguistics to refer to any passage- spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole. 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 best regarded as a SEMANTIC unit; a unit not of form but of meaning. Hatim and Mason (1990) define text as “a set of mutually relevant communicative functions, structured in such a way as to achieve an overall rhetorical purpose”. but as a thing in itself, a text is essentially a semantic unit. It is not something that can be defined as being just another kind of sentence, only bigger” (Halliday, 1985)

Here, Beaugrande: distinctions between text and sentence as a start point. 

The text is an ACTUAL SYSTEM, while sentences are elements of VIRTUAL SYSTEM . The sentence is a purely grammatical entity to be defined only on the level of SYNTAX. The text, [on the other hand], must be defined according to the complete standards of TEXTUALITY. A text must be relevant to a SITUATION of OCCURRENCE, in which a constellation of STRATEGIES, EXPECTATIONS, and KNOWLEDGE is active. A text cannot be fully treated as a configuration of morphemes and symbols. It is a manifestation of a human ACTION in which a person INTENDS to create a text and INSTRUCT the text receivers to build relationships of various kinds. Texts also serve to MONITOR, MANAGE, or CHANGE a SITUATION. Whereas the sentence is not action, and hence has a limited role in human situations; it is used to instruct people about building syntactic relationships. A text is a PROGRESSION between STATES…the knowledge state, emotional state, social state, etc. of text users are subject to CHANGE by means of the text. SOCIAL CONVENTIONS apply more directly to texts than to sentences. PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS are more relevant to texts than to sentences. (1980: 12-14)

11) Textuality is a concept in linguistics and literary theory that refers to the attributes that distinguish the text (a technical term indicating any communicative content under analysis) as an object of study in those fields. Cohesion (связность) C is the network of lex., gram., and other relations that provide links between various parts of a text. These relations or ties organize a text by requiring the reader to interpret words and expressions by reference to other words and expressions in the surrounding sentences and paragraphs. A cohesive device is the interpretative link between, for example, a pronoun and its antecedent (expressing at each stage in the discourse the point of context with what has gone before), or two lexically linked NPs (именные группы), and a series of such ties (having the same referent) is referred to as a ‘cohesive chain’.

Halliday and Hasan (1976) establish five cohesion categories: reference (ссылка), substitution (замена), ellipsis(пропуск легко восстанавливаемого), conjunctions, and lexical cohesion. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 1) present the following examples:a. Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.b. My axe is blunt. I have to get a sharper one.c. Did you see John? - Yes Ø.d. They fought a battle. Afterwards, it snowed. cohesive link; a different cohesive item is implemented : (a) pronoun ‘them’, (b) the substitute ‘one’ (c) omission of some element that presupposes the first sentence,(d) the conjunction ‘afterwards’ - a specification of the way in which what is to follow is systematically connected to what has gone before”.

As for the main cohesion category called lexical cohesion (synanim)

All these instances have in common the fact that one lexical item refers back to another, to which it is related by having a common referent.

Coherence is a network of relations which organize and create a text: cohesion is the network of relations which link words and expressions to other words and expressions in a text, and is the network of conceptual (понятийный) relations which underlie the surface (обделанный) text  structural & semantical. connected to each other by virtue of lexical and grammatical dependencies. In the case of coherence, they are connected by virtue of conceptual or meaning dependencies as perceived by language users. Hoey (1991: 12) sums up the difference between cohesion and coherence as follows:"We will assume that cohesion is a property of the text and that coherence is a facet [i.e. side] of the reader's evaluation of a text. In other words, cohesion is objective, capable in principle of automatic recognition, while coherence is subjective and judgements concerning it may vary from reader to reader."

We could say that cohesion is the surface expression of coherence relations, that it is a device for making conceptual relations explicit. For example, a conjunction such as 'therefore' may express a conceptual notion of 'reason' or 'consequence'. However, if the reader cannot perceive an underlying semantic relation of 'reason' or 'consequence' between the propositions connected by 'therefore', he will not be able to make sense of the text in question; in other words, the text will not 'cohere' (согласовываться) for this particular reader. Generally speaking, the mere presence of cohesive markers cannot create a coherent text; cohesive markers have to reflect conceptual relations which make sense. Enkvist (1978b: 110-11) gives an example of a highly cohesive text which is nevertheless incoherent:

I bought a Ford. The car in which President Wilson rode down the Champs Elysees was black. Black English has been widely discussed. The discussions between the presidents ended last week. A week has seven days. Every day I feed my cat. Cats have four legs.

What actually gives texture to a stretch of language is not the presence of cohesive markers but our ability to recognise underlying semantic relations which establish continuity of sense. The coherence of a text is a result of the interaction between knowledge presented in the text and the reader's own knowledge and experience of the world, the latter being influenced by a variety of factors such as age, sex, race, nationality, education, occupation, and political and religious affiliations. Even a simple cohesive relation of co-reference cannot be recognized, and therefore cannot be said to contribute to the coherence of a text. Coherence can be illustrated by causality: (A) Jack fell down and (B) he broke his crown. Here, (A) is the cause of (B). By reason: Jack (A) spent two days working on the problem and he (B) found the solution. (A) is the reason that led to (B).

12) Intentionality While cohesion and coherence are to a large extent text-centred, intentionality is user-centred. A text-producer normally seeks to achieve a purpose or goal (e.g. persuasion, instruction, request, information, etc.) based on a given plan. I = what they mean? Speakers or writers vary in the degree of success in planning and achieving their purposes, fulfilling their intentions.Acceptability The receivers must accept text as a cohesive and coherent=text capable of utilization. The reader usually supplies information that is missing or unstated. A is very much sensitive to the social activity the text is fulfilling. A legal contract does not leave much room for inference. It contains redundancies. Poetic language will be viewed as such because it calls on for inferences.Acceptability is very much affected by the reader's social and cultural background. The joke of the priest who, on shaving his beard in the morning cut his chin because he was thinking of the sermon he was about to give, and the advice his fellow priest gave him, "Cut your sermon and concentrate on your beard", was not very much appreciated by some students belonging to different culture. Informativity A text has to contain some new information. A text is informative if it transfers new information. Informativity should be seen as a gradable phenomenon. The degree of informativity varies from participant to participant in the communicative event.

13) SituationalityA text is relevant to a particular social or pragmatic context. Situationality is related to real time and place. Communicative partners as well as their attitudinal state are important for the text's meaning, purpose and intended effect. Scientific texts share a common situationality, while ideological texts have different situationalities across languages and cultures. Intertextuality A text is related to other texts. Intertextuality refers "to the relationship between a given text and other relevant texts encountered in prior experience." (Neubert and Shreve, 1992: 117). These include textual conventions and textual expectations. Some text features have become more and more international, e.g. medical texts. They exhibit many features that are English-like, even they are written in Arabic. There is a fine line between plagiarism and intertextuality.

14) Structure of a text.Obviously, all texts are different to a certain extent, but depending upon the author's purpose, the topic and the genre, reading selections tend to be organized to employ a few predominant structural patterns. Structure (Organization): Fiction – Characters, Setting, Problem/Solution, Plot; Non-Fiction – Cause and Effect, Sequence, Problem/Solution, Description, Compare and Contrast

Fiction texts typically have literary elements such as characters, setting, problem/ solution, and plot.

Text Structure Signal Questions & Signal Words: Cause and

Effect (Cause is why something happened. Effect is what happened) What happened? Why

did it happen? What caused it to happen? – So, Because, Since, Therefore, Consequently, For this reason. Compare and Contrast (Shows how two or more things are alike and/or how they are different) – What things are being compared? In what ways are they alike/different? – Same as, Similar, Alike, As well as, Not only…but also, Both, Instead of, Either…or, On the other hand, Different from, As opposed to Sequence (Describes items or events in order or tells the steps tofollow to do something or make something.) – What items, events, or steps are listed? Do they have to happen in his order? Do they always happen in this order? – First, Second, Next, Then, Before, After, Finally, Following, Not long after, Now, Soon. Problem & Solution (Tells about a problem (and sometimes says why there is a problem) then gives one or more possible solutions.) – What is the problem? Why is this a problem? Is anything being done to try to solve the problem? What can be done to solve the problem? – Question is… Dilemma is… The puzzle is… To solve this… One answer is… One reason for. Description (A topic, idea, person, place, or thing is described by listing its features, characteristics, or examples.) – What specific topic, person, idea, or thing is being described? How is it being described (what does it look like, how does it work, what does it do, etc.)? What is important to remember about it? – For instance, Such as…To begin with, An example, To illustrate.

16) Text Types

Simplest classification: written/spoken, dialogical/monological, spontaneous/rural, personal/impersonal, private/ public, subjective/objective, interactional/transactional/

Functional styles: (by Prague school, Golperin) publicistics, newspapers, scientific, belles-lettres, soft official documents.

The theory of functional styles: functional styles, styles of particular social group, traditions of literary writing, of individual authors.

Functional classification: representative style (research, report, weather forecast), directive (commands, orders), expressive (apologies, complains), commensive (offers, contracts), declarative or perfomative (appointment, accusation).

Situational clas-tion: sphere of activity (private, public, official) / form of communication (dial/monol., spoken/written)

Strategic cl-tion: narrative, descriptive, argumentative. Purpose A narrative serves to entertain or inform readers by telling them a story. Structure A narrative has a number of parts: Orientation – who, when, where. Complication – event that causes a complication; there may be more than one in a story. Descriptive words are used to give information about characters and events. Evaluation – reaction by characters to the complication.  Resolution – solution to the problem. Coda (optional) – lesson from the story. Descriptive text is a text which say what a person or a thing is like. Its purpose is to describe and reveal a particular person, place, or thing. Identification; identifying the phenomenon to be described. Description; describing the phenomenon in parts, qualities, or/and characteristics.The Language Feature of Descriptive TextUsing attributive and identifying process,adjective and classifiers in nominal group, simple present tense. Argumentation – is a process whereby a disputable position is supported. Structure: introduction, explanation of the case, outline of the agreement, proof, refutation, conclusion.

17) Genres of texts.

Genre – type of speech. G: simple (conversations, reports, letters), complex (religious payers, psalms). G: characterized by the distinctiveness 0f subject matter, structures, strategies, language; by microcompositional strategies (conversational, narrative, literary narrative); by functional styles (public announcement, invintation letters, decrets, contracts…all brlong to style of official document). Literary g.: Adventure,Epic, Fable, Fairy tale, Fantasy, Folk tale, Historical fiction, Horror, Humour and satire, Legend, Mystery, Myth, Poetry, Realistic fiction, Science fiction, Autobiography, Biography, Memoir, Diary or journal,Travel book, Atlas, Textbook , Reference text. *Some g-s may belong to different style (letter official & private). * Transition btw. literraty/ non l. is smooth.

18)  Register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. The term register was first used by the linguist Thomas Bertram Reid in 1956 – aim -  to distinguish between variations in language according to the user (defined by variables such as social background, geography, sex and age), and variations according to use, "in the sense that each speaker has a range of varieties and choices between them at different times" (Halliday et al., 1964). The focus is on the way language is used in particular situations. M.A.K Halliday and R. Hasan (1976) interpret 'register' as 'the linguistic features which are typically associated with a configuration of situational features - with particular values of the field, mode and tenor...'. Halliday (1964) divided language into user-related varieties=registers of dialects (geographical, temporal, social nonstandard dialects) and user-related v-s of occupation field (medicine, newspaper reporting, legal document, religeon). R & Genre. Ex.: contracts will part of legal register; a sermon (проповедь) will involve the religious R.--> one R. may be realized through various G-s. A particular G may be realized through a number of R-s (a research article in chemistry may be similar to one in sociology – Swales 1981). *R constrains (ограничивает) at the linguistic level of vocabulary & sintax. G – of a text structure.

19) Dialogue & Monologue. – according to the number of participants. M – form/type of text in which 1 person is involved in linguistic act. D – 2 or more involved. M – ex: spoken (political speech), written (dictionary article), D – ex: sp. (everyday informal conversation), wr. (questionnaires, registration forms). Variations of M: audience present: no interruption (lecture), no respond is supposed (at dentist’s), audience absent: speech activities (academic finding a solution, when he is alone), writing activities (diaries). Unexpected features of D: stereotype (complete sentence, well-defined terms, carefully listening, balanced amounts of speech)  reality is opposite. D variations: symmetrical (2 participants – everyday com-tion), asymmetrical (1 real+1 imaginary p. – psychological test), multilogue (several p. – public meetings, joint letters). Speech & Writing:  everybody acquires it - not everyone learns to read and write, dialect variations - restricted and generally follows a standardized form of grammar, structure, organization, and vocabulary, voices -  words, pauses and intonation – punctuation, pronounce – spell, spontaneous and unplanned – planned, immediate audience’s respond – delayed,  informal and repetitive -  formal and compact (logical), simpler sentences connected by lots of ands and buts - complex sentences, attitude upon audience.

20) Text and context. Text and intertext. For Halliday and Hasan, a text is a semantic unit. Halliday stresses the importance of language as an instrument of social interaction among the members of any speech community. He views language as a living entity for the achievement of communication among fellow-communicants in a context of situation. He believes that text cannot be approached without its situational context in which it is embedded. Halliday believes that text is not only a semantic unit but also an instance of social interaction. In its social-semantic perspective, text is an object of social exchange of meanings. Halliday merges semiotic with both sociology and linguistics. Accordingly, text is a sign representation of a socio-cultural event embedded in a context of situation. Context of situation is the semio-socio-cultural environment in which the text unfolds. Text and context are so intimately related that neither concept can be comprehended in the absence of the other. There is a text and there is other text that accompanies it: text that is ‘with’, namely the con-text. This notion of what is ‘with the text’, however, goes beyond what is said and written: it includes other non-verbal signs-on-the total environment in which a text unfolds. According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (fourth edition): ‘context’ refers to what comes before and after a word, phrase, statement, etc., helping to fix the meaning; or circumstances in which an event occurs. We may sometimes be able to make inferences about the context of situation from certain words in texts. These texts, short or long, spoken or written, will carry with them indications of their contexts. Given the text, we should be able to place it into the context that is appropriate to it. In other words we construct the situation. Hence, when discussing text, one should initially bear in mind two important points: context of situation and context of culture. 

According to Halliday and Hasan (1985: 12), texts cannot be approached without reference to the situation as the context “in which texts unfold and in which they are to be interpreted”. They distinguish three situational parameters that help communicants make predictions about the kinds of meaning that are being exchanged. These are: field, tenor and mode of discourse.1. Field of discourse: F refers to “what is happening, to the nature of the social action that is taking place: what is it that the participants are engaged in, in which the language figures as some essential component?” ). 2. Tenor of discourse: According to Halliday and Hasan, T = “who is taking part, the nature of the participants, their statuses and roles: what kinds of role relationship obtain among the participants, including permanent and temporary relationships of one kind or another, both the types of speech role that they are taking on in the dialogue and the whole cluster of socially significant relationships in which they are involved?” Mode of discourse. M = “what part the language is playing, what it is that the participants are expecting the language to do for them in that situation: the symbolic organisation of the text, the status that it has, and its function in the context, including the channel (is it spoken or written or some combination of the two?) and also the rhetorical mode, what is being achieved by the text in terms of such categories as persuasive, expository, didactic, and the like” (Halliday and Hasan, 1985)