Published by: englishcology (Karma: 4552.52) on 4 February 2011 | Views: 3451
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It is increasingly clear that, in order to understand language as a phenomenon, we must understand the phenomenon of text. Our primary experience of language comes in the form of texts, which embody the complete communicative events through which our language-using lives are lived. These events are shaped by communicative needs, and this shaping is reflected in certain characteristic patterns in the texts. However, the nature of texts and text is still elusive: we know which forms are typically found in text but we do not yet have a full grasp of how they constitute its textuality, how they make a text “tick”. The twelve contributions to this volume show how texts across a wide range of text types hold together by different patterns of chunking and linking. The common purpose in all the contributions is to explore the nature of text patterning as the functional environment within which language operates.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
vii
Introduction: Why ‘patterns of text’?
1–11
Colligation, lexis, pattern, and text
Susan Hunston
13–33
Lexical signals of word relations
Antoinette Renouf
35–54
Patterns of cohesion in spoken text
Susan Thompson and Geoff Thompson
55–82
Issues in modelling the textual metafunction
Peter H. Fries
83–107
Mapping key words to problem and solution
Mike Scott
109–127
The negotiation of evaluation in written text
Adriana Bolívar
129–158
Some discourse patterns and signalling of theassessment-basis relation
Michael P. Jordan
159–192
Repeat after me: The role of repetition in the life of an emergent reader
