LINGUIST List 13.230

Mon Jan 28 2002

Review: Scott & Thompson, Patterns of Text

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  • Mario Saraceni, Review of Patterns of Text: In Honour of Michael Hoey

    Message 1: Review of Patterns of Text: In Honour of Michael Hoey

     Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 02:09:05 +0700
    From: Mario Saraceni <Mario.Saracenielc.au.edu>
    Subject: Review of Patterns of Text: In Honour of Michael Hoey


    Scott, Mike and Geoff Thompson, eds. (2001) Patterns of Text: In Honour of Michael Hoey. John Benjamins, hardback ISBN 90-272-2572-9 (Eur) / 1-55619-792-6 (US), vii+323pp.

    Mario Saraceni, Institute for English Language Education, Assumption University.

    _Patterns of Text_ is a collection of twelve papers, each one exploring a different aspect of language patterning that can be observed above the sentence level. The subtitle informs the reader that the volume was compiled in honour of Michael Hoey. At first sight, the fact that the two editors are from the same institution - the University of Liverpool - as Hoey himself, may induce some into thinking that this might be a sort of home-made enterprise, perhaps with a limited scope and target audience. However, one simply needs to read the table of contents and the names of the contributors to realise immediately that the papers are indeed very important contributions to the topic of written discourse analysis. And the book acquires even greater significance if one considers the fact that its area of investigation is still relatively under-explored, despite the advances made by text-linguistics and discourse analysis over the last thirty years or so.

    "Colligation, lexis, pattern, and text", by Susan Hunston, is the first chapter in the book. As is the case for all the other contributors, Hunston is interested in the textual aspects of language,in the conviction that it is in texts, rather than in isolated sentences, that language mostly occurs. Her chapter focuses on the interesting, if somewhat under-studied, phenomenon of colligation, and its role in the subtle relationships which exist among grammar, meaning and discourse.

    In "Lexical signals of word relations", Antoinette Renouf reports the findings of a study that she conducted about the relationship that exists between lexical signals and such sense relations as hyponymy and synonymy. Renouf, who has been working in the field of Corpus Linguistics for some time, pursues her enquiry on the basis of data collected from large corpora.

    In "Patterns of cohesion in spoken text", Susan and Geoff Thompson explore the phenomenon of cohesion in spoken discourse. As the authors observe, cohesion has been mainly analysed in written texts, while very little research has been conducted as far as spoken texts are concerned. This is probably due to the very nature of cohesion, at least according to the paradigms whereby it is normally described. Thus, the paper, which focuses on the relationship that words and sounds form in the establishment of patterns of cohesion, certainly represents a useful step into a relatively unknown territory.

    Those familiar with Systemic Functional Linguistics will immediately recognise the name of Peter Fries, the author of the fourth chapter, entitled "Issues in modelling the textual metafunction". Fries examines the ways in which texts flow phorically and, particularly, the choices that writers and speakers have available when presenting discrete pieces of information as their texts unfold. His analysis is based on the concepts of presenting and presuming reference, as used by Martin 1992, as well as on the better known linguistic notions of Given and New.

    Mike Scott's paper, "Mapping key words to problem and solution", represents an interesting case in which the analytical approach proposed by Corpus Linguistics does not entirely help in generating the answers the researcher sets out to find. Scott's question is: do key words function as signals of text structuring? The notion of "keyness" is here defined in statistical terms: if the frequency of a word is significantly higher, in proportion, in a given text than in a large corpus, the word in question is said to possess the property of keyness in that particular text. In the case of words signalling a problem/solution textual structure, Scott found that such words are rarely key words and that there does not seem to be any clear indication suggesting the existence of a relationship between the concept of keyness and the function of signalling macro textual structures.

    In "The negotiation of evaluation in written text", Adriana Bolivar is interested in finding out how evaluation shapes the structure of written texts and how it contributes to determining text types and genres. She sees the notion of "text" primarily as social interaction, and evaluation as a fundamental element in such interaction. In her analysis of newspaper editorials she identifies three-part structures, composed of what she calls Lead, Follow and Valuate, the third one being the evaluative part. This paper, which is recognisably set in the Functional Linguistics tradition, contributes a new framework for textual analysis.

    The main concern of the seventh chapter is exactly what its title says: "Some discourse patterns and signalling of the assessment-basis relation". Michael Jordan explains the ways in which the particular conjunction that obtains between Assessment and Basis functions as a text forming device, both on a micro level, i.e. with individual clauses, and on a macro level, i.e. across longer stretches of discourse. The Assessment-Basis relation is analysed not only in its own right, but also, and perhaps even more interestingly, in comparison, and in combination, with other types of logical conjunction, such as Topic-Appraisal, Cause-Effect and Purpose-Means.

    Repetition plays a central role in the model of cohesion developed by Michael Hoey, and the chapter by Ann Darnton, "Repeat after me", focuses on the possible benefits that repetition can have for young readers. Rather than pure repetition per se, however, what Darnton finds more useful is "repetition in context". The main tenet of this chapter holds that it is the repetition of contexts, rather than the repetition of isolated lexical items, that helps children to read, since the familiarity created by repeated contexts will facilitate the process of hypothesis-making when children encounter unknown words and try to understand their meaning.

    In "Lexical segments in text", Tony Berber Sardinha addresses a challenging question: can a computer programme effectively divide a text into segments in a way which complies with the intra-textual boundaries set by the author? In trying to answer this question, Berber Sardinha interestingly enough uses Michael Hoey's model of cohesion, which, by definition, applies, to text connectivity rather than to text segmentation, at least in Hoey's original intention. In principle, though, the idea is not without a sound rationale. If Hoey's model of cohesion can be used to identify segments, i.e. groups of contiguous sentences with a high degree of lexical similarity, the same model can also tell us if two contiguous sentences are _not_ similar, thereby setting a segment boundary. Although the findings of the study seem to provide interesting indications confirming the importance of repetition in identifying segments of text, they also, at the same time, highlight the limitations that computer-based textual analysis still suffers from.

    One of the stalwarts of the Birmingham school, Malcom Coulthard, is the author of "Patterns of lexis on the surface of texts". That this chapter is, like the book as a whole, a tribute to Michael Hoey is evident not only in the title, with its clever echo of two of Hoey's main books, but also, and more significantly, in the analytical approach that Coulthard has chosen to adopt. Hoey's model of cohesion, based on links and bonds among sentences, forms the basis for establishing the degree of similarity between two texts, and such similarity, in turn, is used by Coulthard to identify cases of plagiarism in students' essays. Although, as the author himself observes, this method is still in its early stages of development, a stimulating prospect is outlined, in which it may be possible, in the near future, to "find ways of identifying written voices."

    The eleventh chapter, "Patterns of text in teacher education", reiterates the central idea of the volume as a whole: language is most usefully analysed in texts rather than in isolated sentences or lexical items. This consideration should have an impact in foreign language teaching and learning. Too often both teachers and students are preoccupied with grammar and vocabulary only, neglecting the fact that these alone are not enough to guarantee the production of well written, or even merely comprehensible, texts. More awareness, that is, is needed of the ways are structured on a macro level. In order to prove their point, the authors of this chapter, Julian Edge and Sue Wharton, describe the pattern of Situation - Problem - Response - Evaluation (SPRE), first devised by Michael Hoey.

    The last chapter of the volume, "The deification of information", is by none other than John Sinclair, one of the fathers of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Sinclair offers his critical reflections on Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), a type of communication which, with the increasing importance of networked computers, is becoming more and more common. His main argument is that HMI is essentially a one-way type of communication, as opposed to the two-way model which characterises human-to-human communication. This one- way nature of HMI is due to the fact that the human participant does not really have a choice of responses apart from a few clicks on specified points of the screen. Much of what is enthusiastically described as "interactive", actually involves very little real interaction. And, increasingly and somewhat disturbingly, human beings find themselves unable to handle the vast amount of information made available by computers.

    When language is analysed at the level of discourse, one of the most problematic notions to describe is that of "aboutness". If such difficulty arises when the subject of analysis is a single text, it becomes even more complex when a cluster of texts are considered together. The present collection of papers is no exception, as it is indeed typical for this type of volumes to lack a strong sense of connectedness. This is in fact not necessarily a disadvantage, since the heterogeneous nature of such books, on the contrary, allows the reader to become acquainted with a variety of issues, the discussion of which would not normally be found within the boundaries of the same volume. Mike Scott and Geoff Thompson come from somewhat different backgrounds and this diversity is reflected in the healthy range of contributors and the range of aspects of textual analysis they treat.

    The book title, in cases like this, acquires extra significance, as it functions as a binding force. And the name of Michael Hoey certainly plays this role, given than most of the contributors make explicit or implicit references to Hoey's work in the field (mainly written) discourse analysis. Indeed, one final note I would like to spend precisely on the title. What is the meaning of "in honour of" here? Whatever the intentions of Scott and Thompson might have been, I like to think that such an expression is meant as a way to remind people of Hoey's important contribution to the understanding of text as linguistic entity. Books like _On the Surface of Discourse_ (1983) and _Patterns of Lexis in Text_ (1991) have been fundamental, among other things, in fostering progress after Halliday and Hasan (1976) developed their model of cohesion more than 25 years ago. In spite of that, Hoey's work, like that of J. R. Martin for example, is probably not as well known as it deserves to be, and to me "in honour of" in the title of this useful book sounds as a reminder for anyone who may not be familiar with Michael Hoey's work.

    REFERENCES Halliday, M.A.K. and R. Hasan (1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

    Hoey, M. (1983) _On the Surface of Discourse_. London: George Allen and Unwin.

    Hoey, M. (1991) _Patterns of Lexis in Text_. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Hoey, M. (2001) _Textual Interaction_. London: Routledge.

    Martin, J.R. (1992) _English Text_. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    ABOUT THE REVIEWER Mario Saraceni received his PhD from the University of Nottingham, UK. He is currently a lecturer at the postgraduate department in the Institute for English Language Education, Assumption University, Bangkok. His research interests lie in the areas of written discourse analysis, semiotics, English as an international language, and corpus linguistics.