COMPARING

LİTERARY AND NON-

LİTERARY TEXTS
• What is a text?
• What does `literary` mean?
• What does `non-literary` mean?
Text may be taken for a specific language
medium which enables the formation of
cognitive ideas with the aim of imparting
information and forming/interpreting a
coherent sequence of utterances.
• For this reason, to create, understand
and translate a text means to form a
specific cross connection between its
semantic contents.
• Within the ambit(area) of text linguistics, text was
initially viewed as an organized unit larger than a
sentence which consists of a sequence
morphosyntactically and semantically linked utterances
unified thematically as well. This means that a text was
understood as a network made of individual sentences
and paragraphs.
• Non-literary Text and Translation
• The label “non-literary text”, as broad as it may
seem, covers a wide range of texts from
administrative, legal and other official
documents, via economic and business texts,
scientific, technical up to publicist texts.
• As far as the language of non-literary texts is
concerned, there is a striking tendency towards
stereotypical structures and language clichés in
general. Precisely these means of expressions
make the non-literary style more or less
formalized.
• Accordingly, non-literary translation in its
essence stands for a “stylistic operation
which is based not on the transfer of
aesthetic but pragmatic information”
• From a translatological point of view, the non-
literary text corresponds to Newmark’s semantic
translation which is marked by a great respect for
the original tending to be “more complex, more
awkward and more detailed”
• Literary Text and Translation
• In order to grasp the specifics of literary translation, it is deemed
reasonable to look at the properties of a literary text first. These are
pre-determined by the realm of literature, which has an innate
capacity to appeal to one’s feelings and unfetter one’s imagination.
Bearing this in mind, it might seem appropriate to pose a question
why most people usually enjoy literary texts much more than their
non-literary counterparts. It would not be an overstatement to
suggest that literary texts guarantee entertainment on the basis of
their artistic quality, provide the recipient with the author’s
experience or world-view which may motivate them to think, act and
re-evaluate their attitudes.
• Clearly, the most important feature of a literary work
of art is that it is a bearer of an aesthetic function.
Literary text comes into existence as a subjectively
transformed reflection of the objective reality in tune
with the aesthetic-emotional intent of the author:
he/she endeavours to convey his/her ideas, thoughts
and emotions, which is enabled by his/her orientation
towards experience.
• Consequently, literary translation must be
approached as “a kind of aesthetically-oriented
mediated bilingual communication, which aims at
producing a target text intended to
communicate its own form, correspondent with
the source text, and accordant with
contemporary literary and translational norms
of the receptor culture”
• The substantial difference between the two is
that whereas non-literary text is concerned
with information, facts and reality, literary text
comprises the world of the mind, i.e. ideas
and feelings and is grounded on imagination
• While non-literary texts are primarily about
objects from the extra-linguistic reality,
literary texts usually revolve around fictitious
characters, being ontologically and structurally
independent from the real world.
Linguistic
Levels of
Foregrounding
in Stylistics
 Introduction
– The theory of foregrounding
– General Concept:
– Foregrounding refers to the ‘perceptual prominence’
– It is an psychological effect generated through particular aspects to catch the attention of
the reader
e.g. use of bright colors than dull colors
manipulation of the size and position of words or objects in a poster for any product
advertisement (designers do so to highlight the particular aspects of a product and
somehow distract the customer from discouraging aspects i.e: patent pending, etc.
The upper half of the front page of the newspaper, within western framework, looks
‘ideal’, thus ‘foregrounded and the bottom half present ‘real’ thus ‘background.’ Same is
the case with the right hand side of the newspaper.
So, consequently, we are lead to read ‘foregrounded’ part more importantly than any
other.
– Concepts of Foregrounding in Linguistics term
– Foregrounding refers to a form of textual patterning which is motivated specifically for
literary-aesthetic purposes’ (Simpson 2004, p. 50).
– Talking about aesthetic purpose, concept of ‘defamiliarization is also linked to
foregrounding in this regard as the purpose of all art is to force our attention to the very
artfulness of things.
– Literary text can generate foregrounding… an artistic tone by violating text, world (social
norms), language (linguistic norms) and schematic expectations.
– ‘Schematic expectations refers to the ‘conventional ways of viewing the world.’
– ‘Schematic refreshment’ is the process whereby conventional ways of viewing the world
becomes disturbed and accordingly refreshed. Moreover, schemata vary individually.
– Text schematic violations are ‘generic’ violations.
‘Figure’ and ‘Ground’

– The term ‘figure’ refers to:

– Self-contained
– Well-defined
– Distinctive from ‘ground’
– Moveable in relation of ‘ground’
– Detailed and of sharper focus
– This ‘figure’ is what we call ‘fictional characters’ that are foregrounded on
contrary to the ‘ground’ (background)
Forms of Linguistic
Foregrounding
– Linguistic foregrounding can take following forms:

– Deviation:
– Refers to an encounter with something different from what is expected or different from
regulations of some kind.

– Parallelism:
– Refers to some sort of linguistic repetition.
Categorization of Foregrounding

Foregrounding

Deviation Parallelism
Deviation and Parallelism

– Both take place on a number linguistics levels.

– The articles that we are going to discuss, has analyzed non-literary genre; the
writer, Christiana Gregoriou, has taken taglines of various movies, chat-up lines
and advertising slogans.

– Hence it is the foregrounding that persuade people to do things, go ahead and

involve in conversation with a person or to watch a film.
Deviation

– Refers to an encounter with something different from what is expected or different from
regulations of some kind. In other words When a text deviates from already set norms, this
concept is termed as deviation.
– Deviation can be of following certain types:
– External
– Internal
– Morphological
– Phonological
– Graphological
– Grammatical
– Semantic, lexical etc.
External Deviation

– When a text deviates from norms set outside it in relation to its context, that
deviation can be termed as ‘external.’
– To refer a few examples:
– Tagline of the film Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult (1994)
– ‘From the Brother of the Director Ghost’
• (Unexpected/unique and uninformative)
• Mocking its own film in relation to other, where director’s success is a way of drawing
attention.

– Tagline of the film House of Wax (2005)

– ‘On May 6th … see Paris dies!’
• Humorously advertises the death of the celebrity herself rather than the character Paris
Hilton acted.
Internal Deviation

– On contrast to ‘external deviation’, there is ‘internal deviation.’

– ‘External deviation’ is the deviation from ‘primary norms’ whereas ‘internal
deviation’ is the deviation from ‘secondary norms.’
– Primary norms are culture, language, society, etc. specific.
– Secondary norms are specific to an individual. Like, when somebody writes
according to his own particular style and then, he, at some points, deviates
from his own writing style. “…the text has itself set.”
– ‘Internal deviation’ is thus based on some sort of parallelism/repetition.
Examples of Internal Deviation

– Tagline from the film A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

– ‘A tale of murder, lust, greed, revenge and seafood.’
– Grammatically paralleled but semantically internal deviance can be seen.

– Tagline from the film Arachnophobia (1990)

– ‘Eight legs, two fangs and an attitude.’
– Grammatically paralleled but semantically internal deviance is obvious.

– Tagline from the film Army of Darkness (1992)

– ‘Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas.’
– Syntactically and semantically paralleled but the last one adjective phrase is grammatically
and semantically internally deviant.
Deviation in Discourse Structure

– Autobiographies
– Written on behalf of a real-life in first person narration.
– Dramatic plays
– It takes the form of fictional conversation among imagined characters
– Text that deviate from the sort of discourse situation that is expected of them can
be said to deviate ‘discoursally.’
– The tagline from Armageddon (1998)
– ‘Earth. It was fun while it lasted’,
– The tagline for Independence Day (1996)
– ‘Earth. Take a good look. It could be your last.’
– ‘earth’ being directly addressed, and this is done as if a disaster is actually truly about to strike. The above
Armageddon and Independence Day taglines address the movie’s fictional earth-living beings instead
Grammatical Deviation

– As Short stated that due to a large number of grammar rules in English,

Grammatical deviation can be at certain levels:
– Syntactical; unusual order of words
– Taglines are usually in non-standard grammatical form

– Morphological; word morphemes in unusual isolation or unusual combination.

– “Are you from Tennessee cause you’re the only ten I see
– It has also a phonological deviation.

– Tagline from Christmas Vacation (1989)

– “Yule crack up”
– Phonologically and semantic deviation is obvious
Semantic Deviation

– Meaning relations that are paradoxical or logically inconsistent, metaphors.

– The tagline from The Big Lebowski’s (1998)
– ‘Her life was in their hands. Now her toe is in the mail’
– Life is not a physical entity to be handed in someone’s hand

– The tagline from The Erin Brockovich (2000)

– ‘She brought a small town to its feet and a huge corporation to its knees.’
– Metaphorical in the sense she conquered it all!
Lexical Deviation

– Lexical deviation has two forms:

– Neologism; inventing a new word
– Tagline from The Chicken Run (2000)
– ‘Escape or die frying’

– Conversion; Conversion of a word from one grammatical category to another or

use of a word in such a context where it does not belong.
– Gremlin 2: The New Batch (1990) tagline
– ‘Here they grow again’
Graphological Deviation

– Any strangeness of the written form would be classified as a form of ‘graphological

deviation.’
– Strangeness of the written form means:
– Arrangement of the words on the printed page
– Use of punctuation
– Spacing, capitalization, etc.
– For example: The buffalo soldiers (2001)
– “war is hell… but peace is f*#!%!! Boring.”
– Unconventional spellings
– Graphologically deviant but grammatically parallel (subject + verb + complement)
Phonological Deviation
– Irregularities in the way in which words are pronounced fall under phonological
deviation
– Alliteration, assonance and rhyme are not only classes of deviation but also of
parallelism as Short has stated.
– The tagline from The Truman Show (1998)
– On the air. Unaware.

– The tagline from The Volcano (1997)

– The coast is toast
– The tagline from Redneck Zombies (1987
– ‘They’re tobacco chewin’, gut chompin’, cannibal kinfolk from hell!’
To sum up deviation…

– We came across number of deviations and we noted that analyzing deviations,

it didn’t occur alone rather number of deviations and sometimes even
parallelism took place simultaneously.
Parallelism

– “The introduction of extra regularities, not non-regularities in the language.”

– Parallelism is categorized into the following:

– Grammatical
– Phonological
– Semantic
Kinds of Parallelism
– Repetition on the level of grammar is called grammatical parallelism
– Repetition on the level of sound is called phonological parallelism
– For Example:
– The Alien vs Predates (2014)
– ‘Whoever wins, we lose’
– Phonological and grammatical parallelism can be observed here.
– Assonance is there /i/ and alliteration of /w/ sound.

– Parallel clauses; pronouns followed by intransitive verbs.

Conti…
– Meaning repetition can be termed as semantic parallelism
– The repetition of actual world is called lexical parallelism
– The Wayne’s World (1992)
– “You will laugh, you’ll cry. You will hurl.”
– Lexically and grammatically parallel
– Movie goers encounter a schema disruption here. ‘Hurling’ is an atypical and undesirable effect in
response to watching a film, hence the tagline being externally deviant in mockingly suggesting it is
an attractive one.
– According to Short’s parallelism rule:
“in addition to the prominence of parallel structure,
they also invite the reader to search for meaning
relations in term of the parts that are varied.”

– Parallelism has the power not just to foreground parts of a text for us but also to
make us look for parallel or contrastive meaning links between the parallel parts.
– Tagline from The Terminator (1984)
– ‘The things that won’t die, in the nightmare that won’t end’
– Grammatically and lexically paralleled. Structure as well as words are repeated. It is the repetition
of structure (‘the A that won’t B, in the C that won’t D’) that invites readers to find meaning
relations between the A and C pairing (‘thing’ and ‘nightmare’) and also the B and D pairing (‘die’
and ‘end’).This results in a near-synonymous reading of ‘thing’ as something frightening and ‘end’
as something inevitably negative. The words ‘thing’ and ‘end’ do not in themselves necessarily
carry negative associations; it is the parallelism that forces them to carry meanings aligned with
the words ‘nightmare’ and ‘end’ respectively, thereby making the tagline suitable for the action
thriller genre.
 That’s all for today!

Thank You
 TEXT AS DISCOURSE

INTRODUCTION:
When you read, do you observe how the ideas in the text are linked together and
how they form a discourse? For instance, when you read a recipe, it is easy to see how
the ideas are connected because the information is presented in chronological order.
When reading an article, you may notice that the ideas all relate to a particular
topic. How can this clear connection of ideas be achieved when you write a text?
A text is generally considered as written material, especially longer pieces of
writing as in a book, a letter or a newspaper. Discourse is generally regarded as
spoken. Jorgensen and Phillips put forth the qualities of a text as:
Text is defined in linguistics as “a stretch of language which is perceived as a
purposefully connected whole. A text may be spoken or written, produced by one person
or more, and is created by text-internal coherence. Some linguists use the term text
interchangeably with discourse (Collins & Hollo, 2000).”
is not a grammatical unit, but “a product of communication or piece of language
whose shape is motivated by its semantic purposes and pragmatic roles (Collins &
Hollo, 2000).
is the “data” in which ideas are presented in print form. Merriam-Webster
Dictionary
defines it as “the original words of a piece of writing or a speech.” But before you
can even create a logical text through discourse, you have to be guided by writing—its
rules and processes.
Cohesion. The parts are connected.
Coherence. The overall text has meaning.
Intentionality. The writer’s attitude and purpose can be discerned.
Acceptability. The text is recognized
Informativity. There is a quantity of new or expected info.
Situationality. The text’s topic is situationally and culturally appropriate.
Intertextuality. The text can be linked to preceeding discourse.
Written text is also described as written discourse, especially when a simple analysis of
it reveals that is connected discourse.
Written text acquires the characteristics of connected discourse when:
 1. Its ideas are linked logically.
Here are some steps to make a logical division of idea paragraph:
Begin a logical division paragraph with a topic sentence.
In the supporting sentences, discuss each point one after the other.
Introduce each new point with a signal word or phrase.
In addition, support each point with a convincing detail such as an example or
statistic (numbers, amounts, percentages, etc).
Finally, end a logical division paragraph with a concluding sentence.

Connectives for listing arguments

Firstly This can be used for the first supporting argument.
Secondly, furthermore, These can be used for any further supporting
moreover, in addition arguments (except, of course, for “Secondly” which
can only be used for the second.
Finally This can be used for the last supporting argument.
Concluding Connectives
Three common concluding connectives are:
In conclusion These all carry roughly the same
meaning. They should be used to
In summary indicate that you are making final
statements that cover all the supporting
Thus arguments in a very general way.

In fact/Indeed
These two connectives have almost the same meaning and both can be used in
the following situations:
To connect a more detailed statement with a preceding general statement
Example: Today is very warm. In fact (or Indeed) it is 35 degrees Celsius.
To connect a statement which is more factual and exact with a preceding
statement that is more debatable and general.
 Example: The internet is very popular in Australia. Indeed (or In fact), Australia
has the highest proportion of Internet users per head of population of any country in the
world.
DISCOURSE
Discourse is the use of words to exchange thoughts and ideas in an orderly and
organized manner. It deals not only with the grammar aspect of a language but also with
the features of the text and the relationship of words to one another. Discourse
markers—or conjunctions, connectives, and linking devices—help connect ideas to form
a logical text.
Discourse is defined in linguistics as “any stretch of language larger than a
sentence, whether spoken or written and having a logically consistent and unified
structure
The Modes of Discourse
The Traditional Modes of Discourse is a fancy way of saying writers and
speakers rely on four overarching modes: Description, Narration, Exposition, and
Argumentation. Exposition has many supporting and clarifying modes of discourse,
listed in italics below.

Description
This is the first of the four traditional modes of discourse. The point of description is to
paint a verbal picture and tell what things are like. This mode tends to rely on spatial
order (top to bottom, left to right, etc.). But the item can be described based on the order
of importance.
Narration
This is the second of the four traditional modes of discourse. The point of narration is to
tell a story. this mode relies mostly on chronology (time order) or order of importance.
Exposition
This is the third of the four traditional modes of discourse. Exposition is its own
rhetorical mode and one of the four main modes of discourse. However, it is also the
main one that acts as a mother mode to several baby modes (please note that mother
and baby are used by me alone. The babies can certainly stand on their own as adults).
So exposition serves as an umbrella term for several modes including itself. The list
below is not exhaustive.
Exemplification (Illustration)
 Exemplification is also called illustration because the writer uses examples to
highlight or explain (illustrate) his or her point. Exemplification is most often used as part
of other rhetorical modes.
Cause/Effect (Cause/Result)
The mode of cause/effect traces reasons (causes) and outcomes or results
(effects).
Comparison/Contrast (Contrast)
Comparison/Contrast looks at similarities (comparison) and differences
(contrast). Because anytime you look at comparing something differences are assumed
by what is said or not, this mode is often just called "contrast."
Definition (Extended Definition)
Definition is based on explaining a term, concept, idea, etc. Since obviously
providing a one sentence definitions is not enough for a whole paper, one needs to
provide examples (see exemplification/illustration above). That is why sometimes this
mode goes by the name "extended definition."
Division/Classification
Division/Classification is much like comparison/contrast, except two or more
items are examined.
Process (Process Analysis)
Process explains how something is done. At times a whole essay can be written
explaining how something is done or accomplished. But in order to really flesh it out, it
needs analysis, which is why this mode is also called "process analysis." Therefore, the
writer needs to extend the process to include why things are done or happen when they
do and why that might be important.
Problem/Solution
Problem/Solution is concerned with presenting or highlighting an issue (problem)
and how it was/is resolved (solution).
Argumentation
This is the fourth of the four traditional modes of discourse. The point of
argumentation is to convince the reader with logic.