Narrative text type

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Narrative text type

• Paola Catenaccio
• Lingua Inglese I (LIN)
• 2009-2010

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Text linguistic practice

• Consider the following two texts.
• No parking
• This is a school yard. Drivers should not park
  their vehicles here.
• Which text is more appropriate to function as a
  street sign? What user-centred standards of
  textuality have influenced your choice?

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Focus constructions in English and their
functions

• Inversion And then along comes Mary
• Sentence type in which the logical subject
  appears in post-verbal position, while some other
  canonically post-verbal constituent appears in
  clause-initialposition. The fronting of a certain
  constituent (usually an adverbial/adjunct or
  complement) triggers subject-verb inversion.
• Verbs in inversion
• are copular or intransitive and express existence
  or appearance,
• typically indicate position (be, stand, lie, sit,
  hang) or motion (come, go, fall, roll),
• the fronted constituent has locative meaning and
  is usually an adverbial of place or direction,
  hence the term locative inversion.
• A preferred option in fiction due to its
  presentative, topic- and setting introducing
  function.
• Relatively rare and strongly conditioned by
  context least common in conversation and
  virtually restricted to the written mode, showing
  its highest frequency in journalistic writing and
  fiction as a device for the description of
  settings and for stylistic effects.

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Examples of inversion

• And certainly the atmosphere was less than
  festive in the headmaster's sitting-room. Near
  the fireplace a table had been installed, and on
  it placed two bottles. Behind the bottles stood
  Mrs Crumwallis - tall, bony, straggly of hair,
  the only memorable feature about her being her
  large, round, immensely thick-lensed glasses.
  (BNC H8Y 73-75)
• It was a pack of cards, walking through the
  garden. There were clubs (they were soldiers),
  and diamonds, and ten little children (they were
  hearts). Next came some Kings and Queens. Then
  Alice saw the White Rabbit, and behind him, the
  Knave of Hearts. And last of all, came THE KING
  AND QUEEN OF HEARTS. (BNC FNS 399-403)
• Jules Bellaire sat opposite Alice at a white,
  wrought-iron table on one of the large terraces
  outside the Château de St Denis. A sun umbrella
  sheltered them from the wan May sunshine. On the
  table lay several large swatches of fabrics which
  Jules had brought out from Paris for Alice's
  inspection. (BNC FS1 591-593)

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• Preposing (fronting) Mary her name was
• Sentence type in which a canonically postverbal
  phrasal constituent appears in preverbal
  position.
• Differs from inversion in structural terms in
  that the subject remains in preverbal position.
• Not limited to the fronting of any particular
  phrasal category, but fronted objects and other
  nominals are most common, while AdjP preposing
  appears to be most constrained.
• Linking function, relating the preposed element
  to the previous discourse, often by using
  anaphoric deictic markers such as this, that,
  these and such.
• Echoing preceding information (esp. with fronted
  VPs), also used to convey a speaker's uncertainty
  or disbelief/doubt with respect to the link of
  the preposed constituent.
• Expressing contrast (contrastive topicalization)
• Often made explicit by the mentioning of both
  contrasted referents and the presence of
  connectives such as but.
• Object-fronting is often chosen in contexts where
  there is a need to emphasize or contrast a
  discourse element.

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• At the chilly boarding-school to which her
  parents sent her in the mistaken belief that she
  would be less lonely among girls of her own age,
  the prizes for mathematics - a subject which she
  didn't particularly care for but which came
  easily to her - were framed reproductions of the
  works of Italian painters. Duccios and
  Signorellis and Martinis hung by her bedside at a
  time when other girls pinned up Elvis and Cliff
  or even Paul Anka. Such pictures she always found
  calming to her nerves (BNC FB9 74-76 )
• Mrs Wilson had not died, but it was said she was
  very ill and was expected to die. And die she
  did. (BNC AC7 1072-1073)
• "He may be happy to see his father!" Ferdinando
  shouted. "He is my son and blood will tell. Now
  let me go." And off he galloped, with her
  watching until he was a speck on the horizon.
  (BNC ADS 1296-1300)
• "The land was ours by right." Jagatan raised
  himself on one elbow, and Burun guessed that he
  had been drinking for most of the afternoon. "I
  remember when we rode here, your father and I.
  Young and strong we were." (BNC FSE 2890-2892)

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Remember also

• Cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences
• Anticipatory it/existential there ? extraposed
  subjects/objects
• That this will do any good is far from clear.
• It is far from clear that this will do any good.
• I found the problem difficult
• I found it difficult to solve the problem
• Passivisation
• The company sacked 20 employees
• Tewnty employees were sacked

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Focus on information flow

• Identify the information-packaging constructions
  in the following short texts and explain why the
  speaker/writer may have chosen these
  non-canonical constructions
• Consider the following dialogue
• A This has blown up into an enormous scandal. I
  hear that theyre going to fire the secretary of
  state.
• B No, its the secretary of defense who they
  want to fire, not the secretary of state.

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• Just as she lit an old candle, there appeared a
  strange face in the window.
• I work outside in the fresh air, which I really
  enjoy, and I dont have anyone telling me what to
  do every minute. That I also like.
• That night he was wakened in his blanket by the
  dark force of something he had heard and
  neglected to consider.

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Focus on cohesion

• Lunch. The word and the thing itself cause
  endless trouble still in England at that join in
  the class pyramid where it is still called
  dinner. Any Englishman who does call lunch dinner
  indicates at once and for sure to any other
  Englishman that he hails from somewhere below the
  middle of the middle classes. The difficulty is
  relatively new in the long vista of English
  history, since the word till quite recently meant
  a snack between proper meals. There was a time
  when everyone in England who could afford to do
  so dined in the afternoon and supped in the
  evening. Then, with ease and affluence lunch
  began its metamorphosis to a meal in its own
  right. It is now a social divider of infinite
  power.
• Comment on the following cohesive relations
  instantiated in the text
• Reference (personal, demonstrative, comparative
  anaphoric, cataphoric)
• Substitution
• Lexical cohesion (recurrence and hyponymy)

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Descriptive texts produced by students (1)

• One of the most beautiful places in the fashion
  capital is Sempione Park, which is situated in
  the very heart of Milan. Just behind the
  Sforzesco Castle, youll find this fantastic
  green island, in sharp contrast with the
  surrounding noisy roads and grey buildings. Here
  you can relax and forget about your everyday
  routine, immersed in the shade of tall and
  beautiful trees. As you walk one of the many
  winding paths, you can come across a nice still
  little lake with its pleasant freshness.

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Descriptive texts produced by students (2)

• Our university is placed in a wonderful and
  new-built area in Sesto San Giovanni. The
  construction was built in 2003 and it is massive
  and well-structured. It rose from the ruins of
  the ancient industrial past, to be transformed
  into a bright, glassy, futuristic place where
  thousands of people meet in a multicultural
  environment.

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Empire state building

• http//www.esbnyc.com/tourism/index.cfm?CFID35897
  230CFTOKEN16743613

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Another narrative text

• http//www.colgate.com/app/Colgate/US/Corp/History
  /HistoryVideo.cvsp

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Identifying features

• Function?
• Cognitive process involved?
• Introduction?
• Thematic text base?
• Verbs? Tenses?
• Sequence forms?

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Introduction and thematic text base

• Situational introduction.
• Our 200-year history is a story of innovation,
  popular global brands and the indispensible role
  that people play making a global company
  successful.
• It begins in the early 1800 hundreds, with an
  Englishman, William Colgate

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Sequence forms

• It begins in the early 1800 hundreds At the
  time In 1806 From the beginning

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• I first became interested in the study of aging,
  maturity and retirement more or less by accident.
  It was 1973, and I was 23, living and teaching at
  the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. I
  was completing my doctorate and working on my
  first book, Bodymind. I was asked by Dr. Gay
  Luce, who was working on creating an innovative
  new human potential training program, if Id be
  interested in partnering with her. I decided to
  move to Berkeley to join Dr. Luce in crafting
  this program. It was going to be a yearlong
  comprehensive holistic curriculum, very different
  from the weekend workshops and two-hour lectures
  that were becoming popular. Before it even got
  off the ground, it struck Gay that in our
  youth-focused culture, nobody was using any of
  these innovative therapeutic techniques with the
  elderly. She asked if Id be open to joining her.
  As a young man in my early 20s, the idea of
  working with the elderly didnt initially hold
  much charm for me. I liked being with people my
  own age and also doing programs for people in
  their 30s and 40s. I told Gay I would get the
  project started and then move on.
• http//www.agewave.com/media_files/Life20after20
  50.pdf

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• Point of view?
• Style?
• Presentation?

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Different ways of telling the same story?

• The Tenerife disaster
• Report
• Article 1
• Article 2

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• Focus?
• Text structuring?

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(No Transcript)
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Point of view
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Composition