Coulthard Malcom (Editor). Advances in written text analysis

Routledge, 2004. — xiv, 320 pp. — ISBN: 0-203-42265-1.Advances in Written Text Analysis provides an overview of a wide range of exciting and compatible approaches to written text analysis. The collection has all the advantages of coming from a single ‘school of thought’ — it consists solely of papers by present and past Birmingham staff and students, plus three ‘honorary’ colleagues M.A.K.Halliday, Peter Fries and Greg Myers, frequent and highly stimulating visitors. Lying behind the articles in this collection are several shared assumptions: that text analysis is best located within a Systematic view of language; that written text is essentially interactive; that it is imperative when analysing texts to be aware of the purpose and the process of creation; that any given text is just one of a series of possible textualizations and for that reason gains part of its meaning from what has not been said.The book includes both classic and specially commissioned papers and the focus of the individual papers ranges from single words and individual expressions through the patterning of clauses to the organization of paragraphs, sections and complete texts. The examples are selected from a wide variety of subject areas, texts and text-types: pure and social science, academic and popular journals, newspapers and weekly magazines, literary and non-literary narratives.Although each of the papers is concerned with fundamental research and can be read without reference to any of the others, the collection has been organized so that the first seven papers can be used as the basis of a course on written text analysis for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students.On analysing and evaluating written text
Trust the text
Signalling in discourse: a functional analysis of a common discourse pattern in written and spoken English
Clause relations as information structure: two basic text structures in English
Predictive categories in expository text
Labelling discourse: an aspect of nominal-group lexical cohesion
The text and its message
The analysis of fixed expressions in text
The construction of knowledge and value in the grammar of scientific discourse, with reference to Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species
Frames of reference: contextual monitoring and the interpretation of narrative discourse
Inferences in discourse comprehension
Narratives of science and nature in popularizing molecular genetics
Evaluation and organization in a sample of written academic discourse
Genre analysis: an approach to text analysis for ESP
On Theme, Rheme and discourse goals
Negatives in written text
It, this and that
The structure of newspaper editorials
On reporting reporting: the representation of speech in factual and factional narratives