Formal typologies

Text Processing (Knowledge).

LECTURE 17

Main points:

1. Formal typologies.

2. Functional typologies.

3. Text processing (knowledge): syntactic, semantic, pragmatic.

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We have typified text-processing as being concerned with three problems - the discovery of content, purpose and context - and would see the process as skilled problem-solving, focusing first on synthesis (writing) and then on analysis (reading).

Texts have traditionally been organized into informal typologies on the basis of topic - the propositional content of texts - making use of quantitative measures (frequency of occurrence or particular lexical items or syntactic structures) which were able to typify “the language of science”, “poetry”, “technical or mathematical texts” etc.

There is a fundamental problems of definition. What is meant by “poetry” or “literature” and how are “scientific”, “technical” and “mathematical” distinguished?

2. Functional typologies have been suggested, a few based on the notion of degree of translatability but the majority organized on a three-way distinction on whether the major focus of the text is on: 1)the producer (emotive), 2)the subject-matter (referential) or 3)the receiver (conative) (конативна). The typology of these distinctions 1)the expressive, 2) informative and 3)vocative (вокативна); the poetic, metalinguistic and phatic being, presumablly, subsumed under the expressive, vocative and informative, respectively.

It is suggested that texts can be divided into three types - literary, institutional (навчальні) and scientific - but it is unclear under which function “institutional” is intended to come and the problem of overlap (збіг) still remains; “scientific...including all fields of science and technology but tending to merge with institutional texts in the area of social sciences”.

3. Text processing (knowledge): syntactic, semantic, pragmatic.

There is a well-known distinction between two kinds of knowledge: procedural knowledge (процедурний) (knowing how to do something) and factual knowledge (фактичний) (knowing that something is the case). We propose to treat text-processing as an instance of procedural knowledge and skill in applying that knowledge.

The communicator (and translator) calls upon many domains of knowledge in processing texts but the centrality of linguistic knowledge among these is in no doubt.

Three interlocking levels of linguistic knowledge and indicating their role in the creation of discourse exist: syntactic knowledge, semantic knowledge and pragmatic knowledge.

a) Syntactic knowledge.

Knowledge at this level is limited to the means for creating clauses, the systems of chain and choice which organize the semantic meaning. Syntactic knowledge is a matter of knowing what elements exist in a language and how they may be legitimately (вірно) combined.

b) Semantic knowledge.

Semantic knowledge are necessary when we have the text, but this “text” has lost its “texture” as a result of the discontinuities created by the omitted words. In this case, competent reader recognizes the syntactic structure. The text “makes sense” as a grammatical sentence. What is strange about this text is not the propositional structure underlying it.

c) Pragmatic knowledge.

The next step is to go beyond the word and demonstrate that sentences themselves can, to some extent, be predicted from their context just as words can. We are now in the domain of pragmatics which involves plans and goals and the textual characteristics of intentionality, acceptibilyty and situationality - the attitudes of the producer and its relevance to its context of use - all matters which take us well beyond the code (the syntax and semantic) and into the area of the use of the code for communication.

We have been suggesting that the linguistic knowledge which underlines the user’s ability to process texts can be divided (for analytic purposes) into syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge, all of which play a part in the production and comprehension of texts.

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