INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH TEXT LINGUISTICS

1.0 Introduction
Professor Christopher Gledhill
(Notes de cours, Linguistique du texte anglais, 48LGAN23, EILA, Université Paris Diderot)
TOPIC 1. LINGUISTIC TERMINOLOGY
In order to analyse and compare texts, you need to know the technical words and systems that
linguists have developed use to describe language. In this course, I use the same terminology as
the British linguist Michael Halliday (see Bibliography). In order to do Exercise 1, you’ll need to
know the main levels or ‘ranks’ of language (see tables 1 and 2) as well as the basic ‘lexical classes’
(also known as ‘parts of speech’, see table 3).
Table 1 Ranks of Language 1
Context
Example: Every utterance takes place as a particular ‘text’ and in a
particular ‘context’, for example in 1952 a man called Derek Bentley
said ‘Let him have it!’ How can we understand this text if we know
nothing about its context?
Semantics What does ‘Let him have it!’ mean ?
Lexicogrammar
Phonology, Graphology,
etc.
How would you describe ‘Let him have it’ as a structure (a string of
words) ?
What is the difference between how the written language represents <
Let him have it! > and how this utterance is realised in the spoken
language ?
Table 2 Ranks of the Lexicogrammar
Clause
What is strange about this clause: ‘I do always the same thing’?
Group
What is wrong with this group: ‘Foreign Applied Languages’?
Word
Morpheme
Why can’t you say: ‘I would like to integrate a School of Journalism’?
Why can’t you say: ‘I have always been fascinated by aircrafts’?
Table 3 Lexico-grammatical classes
Lexical:
Noun (N)
Adjective (Adj)
Verb (V)
Adverb (Adv)
Grammatical:
Pronoun (Pro)
Determiner (Det)
Auxiliary (Aux)
Conjunction (Conj) or Preposition (Prep)
1 The terms presented in this course belong to Michael Halliday’s ‘Systemic Functional’ model of language. See the
Bibliography at the end of these course notes for references.
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