Text Analysis

BS English 7th
There are many contrastive points that can be made
here.

• Schemas
• Quantitative observations
• Qualitative comments on quantitative data
• The cooperative principle and Gricean Maxims
• Speech acts
• Face threatening acts
• Turn-taking, preference and interruption
Schemas
• In psychology and cognitive science, a schema
describes a pattern of thought or behavior that
organizes categories of information and the
relationships among them. 
• This is a powerful set of concepts for analysing
the interpretative processes that are activated
when audiences respond to speakers and to
drama in particular.
• It also takes us one step further in our
consideration of how real courtroom interactions
are encountered by an audience in a similar way.
• In open court the interaction is ‘played’ to a
public audience and then, through journalistic
reporting, transmitted to a wider public
audience. 
Quantitative Observation
• Quantitative observation is an objective
collection of data which is primarily focused on
numbers and values – it suggests “associated to,
of or depicted in terms of a quantity”. Results
of quantitative observation are derived using
statistical and numerical analysis methods.
• If we move to a quantitative analysis, we can
compare the texts statistically in terms of the number
of words uttered by each speaker over a comparable
number of turns.

• This is useful in analysing the proportion of talk

allotted to each speaker and the length of turns in the
three extracts, which tells us something about
control and topic movement. 
Qualitative Comments
• Qualitative feedback is an important part of
developing a new product or a new product's
features.
• It's used to gain an understanding of underlying
reasons, opinions, and motivations.
• It provides insights into the problem or helps to
develop ideas or hypotheses for potential
quantitative research
The cooperative principle and Gricean Maxims

• In social science generally and linguistics specifically,

the cooperative principle describes how people achieve
effective conversational communication in common
social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers
act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to
be understood in a particular way.
Grice's Maxims
• The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as
informative as one possibly can, and gives as much
information as is needed, and no more.
• The maxim of quality, where one tries to be
truthful, and does not give information that is false or
that is not supported by evidence.
• The maxim of relation, where one tries to be
relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the
discussion.
• The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as
clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one
says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.
• The CP presupposes that one’s conversational
contribution should be such as is required, at the stage
at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or
direction of the talk exchange in which [one] is
engaged’ (Grice 1975: 45). 

• As the maxims stand, there may be an overlap, as

regards the length of what one says, between the
maxims of quantity and manner; this overlap can be
explained (partially if not entirely) by thinking of the
maxim of quantity (artificial though this approach may
be) in terms of units of information.
• In other words, if the listener needs, let us say, five
units of information from the speaker, but gets less,
or more than the expected number, then the speaker
is breaking the maxim of quantity.
• However, if the speaker gives the five required units
of information, but is either too curt or long-winded
in conveying them to the listener, then the maxim of
manner is broken.
• The dividing line however, may be rather thin or
unclear, and there are times when we may say that
both the maxims of quantity and quality are broken
by the same factors.
Speech acts

• In linguistics, a speech act is an utterance

defined in terms of a speaker's intention and the
effect it has on a listener. Essentially, it is the
action that the speaker hopes to provoke in his
or her audience. Speech acts might be
requests, warnings, promises, apologies,
greetings, or any number of declarations.
There are three types of acts in the
speech acts
• Locutionary speech act is roughly equivalent to
uttering certain utterance with certain sense and
reference, which again is roughly equivalent to
meaning in traditional sense (Austin, 1962: 108).
• In line with this, Cutting (2002: 16) states that
locutionary is what is said.
• The example of the locutionary speech
▫ 1. It’s so dark in this room.
▫ 2. The box is heavy
• Illocutionary act is performed via the communicative
force of an utterance, such as promising, apologizing,
offering (Yule, 1996:48).
• This act is also called the act of doing something in
saying something.
• Illocutionary act can be the real description of
interaction condition.
• For example:
▫ 1. It’s so dark in this room.
▫ 2. The box is heavy.
• Based on the examples above, the first sentence shows
a request to switch the light on and the second
sentence shows a request to lift up the box.
• Perlocutionary act is also the act offering someone.
• Perlocutionary act refers to the effect the utterance has on
the thoughts or actions of the other person.
• A perlocutionary act is specific to the circumstances of
issuance, and is therefore not conventionally achieved just
by uttering that particular utterance, and includes all those
effects, intended or unintended, often indeterminate, that
some particular utterance in a particular situation cause.
• For example:
▫ 1. It is so dark in this room.
▫ 2. The box is heavy
• Based on the example it can be inferred that the first
sentence is uttered by someone while switching the light on
and the second sentence is done by someone while lifting
up the box.
Face threatening acts

• A face-threatening act (FTA) is an act which

challenges the face wants of an interlocutor.

• According to Brown and Levinson (1987

[1978]), face-threatening
acts may threaten either the speaker's face or the
hearer's face, and they may threaten either
positive face or negative face.

• This behaviour violates the interactional norms of

the courtroom. 
• These face threatening acts used by the lawyer to
challenge Blair and threaten his positive face,
constitute indirect speech acts which fail to disrupt the
generally polite conduct of the interaction
 Turn-taking, preference and interruption
• By contrasting the real and fictional texts we can see how turn-
taking operates normally and where deviation from norms occurs.
• The notion of ‘projectability’ is an important one in conversational
analysis.
• Because speakers understand that turns are constructed in terms
of units that are predicted by the previous one – yes/ no question
expects a yes or no answer; information-seeking question requires
an informative answer – we are able to predict their
possible completion at transition relevance places (TRPs), which
are indicated by such things as a change in the pitch or volume of
the voice, the end of a syntactic unit, nomination, silence or body
language
• Turns to talk are allocated by means of three
ordered options (Sackset al. 1974):
▫ the current speaker selects the next
▫ a listener self selects
▫ speaker continuation.
• This is a powerful distributional device and an
important structuring feature of talk.
• ‘Preference’ too is an important principle.

• Conversation analysts note that talk is organized by

means of structural pairs: question with answer,
invitation with acceptance or rejection, into which
speakers build preference for particular responses.

• For example, in the case of yes/no questions the

preference is for an positive or negative response.