ENG523 Final Term Subjective by Nimma Malik

ENG523 · SUBJECTIVE PART · BY NIMMA MALIK

What is Transitivity?

In traditional grammar, transitivity was developed as the concept of transitive or intransitive verb (Halliday, 1976) whether the verb takes an object or not, but in SFL it functions to link grammar to the meta functions; however, in Halliday’s terms, transitivity as a major component in experiential function of the clause deals with the “transmission of ideas “representing ‘processes’ or ‘experiences’: actions, events, processes of consciousness and relations” (1985). It is a semantic system to analyze representations of reality in a linguistic text and create the same experience through various lexico-grammatical options influenced by different mind styles or authorial ideology. (Fowler, 1986).

What is Corpus? Long

A corpus is a collection of spoken or written authentic texts that is representative of a particular area of language use, by virtue of its size and composition. It is not always the case, however, that the corpus is representative of language use in general, or even of a specific language variety, as the data set may be very specialized (such as material collected from the internet) and it may not always be based on samples of complete texts. A corpus is usually computer-readable and able to be accessed with tools such as concordances which are able to find and sort out language patterns. d. A general corpus, also known as a reference corpus.

A specialized corpus, as Hunston (2002) explains is: “A corpus of texts of a particular type, such as newspaper editorials, geography textbooks, academic articles in a particular subject, lectures, casual conversations, essays written by students etc. It aims to be representative of a given type of text. It is used to investigate a particular type of language.”

Specialized corpora are required when the research question relates to the use of spoken or written discourse in particular kinds of texts or in particular situations. A specialized corpus might be used, for example, to examine the use of hedges in casual conversation or the ways in which people signal a change in topic in an academic presentation.

Five needed terms before deciding a topic.

A research topic is your general area of interest, whereas the research question is the particular thing you want to find out and which grows out of your research topic (Sunderland 2010). When deciding on a topic, there are a few things that you will need to do:

•  brainstorm for ideas
•  choose a topic that will enable you to read and understand the literature
•  ensure that the topic is manageable and that material is available
•  make a list of key words
•  be flexible
•  define your topic as a focused research question
•  research and read more about your topic
•  formulate a thesis statement

What are the factors of Multimedia discourse analysis?

Multimedia discourse analysis is a field that examines how meaning is constructed and communicated through multimedia, which includes a combination of text, images, sound, and video.

Factors:

•  Discourse analytic
•  Sociolinguistic
•  Nonlinguistic

Johnstone research project explain.

In her book Qualitative Methods in Sociolinguistics, Johnstone (2000) lists a number of criteria that contribute to the development of a good and workable research topic. In her case, she is talking about research in the area of sociolinguistics. What she says, however, applies equally to discourse analysis projects. These criteria include:

•  Ability to get the discourse data that is needed for the research project.
•  A well-focused idea about spoken or written discourse that is expressed as a question or a set of closely related questions;
•  An understanding of how discourse analytic techniques can be used to answer the research question you are asking;
•  An understanding of why your question about spoken or written discourse are important in a wider context; that is, why answering the question will have practical value and/or be of interest to the world at large;
•  Familiarity with and access to the location where your discourse analysis project will be carried out;
•  The time it will realistically take to carry out the discourse analysis project, analyze the results and write up the results of the project;
•  Being comfortable with and competent in the ways of collecting the discourse data required by the project;
•  Being competent in the method of analysis required for the project.

What are kinds of discourse analysis?

1. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
2. Conversation Analysis (CA)
3. Narrative Analysis
4. Multimodal Discourse Analysis
5. Discursive Psychology
6. Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
7. Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis
8. Genre Analysis
9. Political Discourse Analysis