schemi per esame inglese

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: is the analysis of language in use -> investigation of what the language is used for.
The focus shift from language as form to discourse as action -> interaction between writer and reader as realized in texts.
Discourse is studied as an interaction -> the communicative procedures can be related to the whole communicative event and to relationship between the writer and the hypothetical reader -> writer always assume they are writing for some specific readers and adjust their writing to the reader’s anticipated reactions.
This focus on action and interaction is accompanied by a greater emphasis on the social dimension of language and the way in wich language choice is influenced by the specific audience.
Discourse as a form of social behavior can be related to the community of users

Register studies and genre analysis is a subdisciplinary of discourse analysis

REGISTER:
a predictable form of language
a configuration of meanings associated with a particular situational configuration of:
FIELD: area of activity -> law, medicine… + purpose (text types, genre…)
TENOR: roles of the participants (ex to ex, ex to student…)
MODE: role payed by the language including:
CHANNEL: written/spoken
RHETORICAL MODE: persuasive, expository…

GENRE:
steretypical social action -> es. academic journal articles, exams, university course… focus on the purpose (scopo)
are mainly identified by its communicative purpose but it is also characterized by the structures that are conventionally adopted by the specialost members of the professional or academic community -> an important dimension of variation across genres is the role played by the discourse community in identifying the charateristics of:
internal communication -> expert to expert
external communication -> expert-not (yet) expert
comprises a class of communicative events the members of wich share some set of communicative purposes -> influences and constrains choice of content and style. In addition to purpose, exemplars of genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structire, style, content and intended audience

TEXT TYPE: focus the receiver’s attention on different aspects of the communicative situation and are related to different mental activities -> 5 types and related mental processes:
DESCRIPTIVE -> focusing on people, objects and relation in space -> perception in time and space
NARRATIVE -> focusing on persons, objects and relation in time -> perception in time and space
EXPOSITIVE -> focusing on the analysis or synthesis of concepts -> comprehension
ARGUMENTATIVE -> focusing on the relations between concepts, where one opinion is upheld in relation with opposing opinions -> judging
REGULATIVE -> focusing on inteded future behavior -> planning

Text type vs genre -> abstract vs concrete -> focusing on text types means identifying the implied mental activity at work in text production and reception -> focusing on genre means focusing on the discourse structure of related texts

Register and Genre -> a genre may be related to a register -> es. a psychology textbook:
field -> academic study of psychology
tenor -> expert to student
mode -> written, pictures, graphs, illustrations
this can be used to predict the textual structure of genre: which elements (es. acts and moves like definitions and generalizations, examples, summaries…) must occour, where and how often they can occour.
register is functional to predict genre
both focus on the social content of language (context)
are complementary
genre is above the register
genre focuses on metafunctions of language interfaced with social processes
register focuses on social processes with more focus on the sctructure of the communicative event

LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE:
lexical features:
key-words
semantic fields
denotation vs connotation (different degrees of emotional meaning-evaluation)
general vs specific meaning
idioms
metaphors
Grammatical features:
density, dominant patterns (noun group vs. verb group)
Textual/rhetorial features:
lay-out
titling
cohesion
Co-text and context

COMPREHENSION:
identification of the main proposition in the sentence and subordinate proposition
identification of the nominal group
head and adjectives
channels:
visual
auditory
cognitive
emotional/kinesthetic
(olfactory and gustatory)

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Introduction
Method
Results
Discussion

ABSTRACT -> can be divided into 4 moves:
introducing purpose
describing methodology
summarizing results
presenting conclusion

INTRODUCTION -> CARS = create a research space
Establishing a territory -> es. reviewing items of previous research
Establishing a niche -> indicating a gap, raising a question, continuing a tradition or counterclaiming
Occuping the niche -> outlining purposes or announcing principal findings, indicating research article structure

METHOD -> this section describes methods with different degrees of expliciteness/impliciteness

RESULTS -> often the most repetitive section. It’s often integrated with tables and graphs which summarize quantitative data

DISCUSSION -> may comprise the following moves:
background information -> summarizing points, revelant theoretical or technical information
statement of results
reference for prewious research for comparison or to support findings
explanation -> giving reasons for the results
exemplification -> to support explanation
deduction or hypothesis -> about the generalisability of the results
recommendations for further research, possible lines of investigation

CONCLUSION -> may coincide with the discussion or constitute an indipendent section

REFERENCES
at the end: name of the author, editor, title, place of pubblication, publisher, year of pubblication
in the body: name of the author, year of pubblication, page(s)
order, synthesis, exhaustiveness of information help the user finding the information he needs to retrieve
order = where to look at
synthesis = the more information in the less space
exhaustiveness = despite synthesis
the APA style -> is a guide to useing the style of American Psychological Association
general style note
page formats
research documentation
sample references

RESEARCH SCHEDULE
chose a theme of research
identify the problem under investigation
How to choose and retrieve materials
How to refer to these materials, how to refer to authorial voices
potential objective -> positioning myself in the discourse community by providing an original contribution

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