| Available from UMI in association with The British Library.; This study investigates the identification and description of organization patterns, in written texts, and their explicit linguistic signals within the framework of the Clause Relational approach. The research has been carried out in two phases: the application of the Clause Relational analysis to a selection of texts, and the use of a modified cloze procedure in order to test the initial analysis.; Chapter 1 introduces the Clause Relational approach to linguistic description. It describes the development of the notion of 'contextual grammar' and the definition and properties of the minimal units that combine to produce sequences of any size.; Chapter 2 makes a critical comparison between several major approaches to the study of 'text' and 'discourse' in order to clarify the rationale for using the Clause Relational method in describing the texts.; Chapter 3 describes two major discourse patterns, namely 'General-Particular' and 'Situation-Problem-Response-Evaluation', in a selection of texts. It also demonstrates, using a diagrammatic representation, that discourses can be described in terms of patterns linked together by clause relations.; Chapter 4 presents and discusses the results of the cloze procedure applied to three of the passages described in Chapter 3. This method offers an objective means of testing the initial analysis by keeping the message constant and varying the decoder. As a result of this application of the cloze procedure, a number of important conclusions about the nature of connected sequences and the function of explicit signals within them were arrived at. For example, (1) the choice of signals in a particular discourse is directly determined by the organization pattern, (2) a range of alternative signals could perform the same function in a particular discourse, and (3) it is possible to arrive at a finite list of discourse signals for every type of discourse pattern. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
