(Comments on Activities)
There are very few 'single right answers' for these activities or exercises, so the comments that follow are chiefly about some of the things you may have found.
One key point to make is that all these kinds of text are distinct and different from each other - as different from each other as phonemes are. In class, one student should have been able to read out their sample text, without 'priming' the rest of the group by telling them which discourse type it was intended to be, and the rest of you should have been able, fairly reliably, to say "yes, that's a typical letter home from abroad" (option e) or "yes, that's clearly a music-club-newsletter-type extract" (option c). Notice the words typical/type in both those phrases in those hypothesized reactions:
Throughout our experiences with language, all the time that we are weaving linguistic and non-linguistic activities together in our lives, we are able very rapidly to 'typecast' or pigeonhole the kind of language coming at us.
We rely very heavily on our ability speedily to categorize discourses or texts into types. Sometimes this backfires - e.g. when someone we know starts talking to us very excitedly and we think they are pleased to see us, only for us to gradually realize that they are very angry with us! One arena of language use which is notoriously tricky in presenting text to us as if it were of one type, when it is really of another, is Advertising. E.g. the advert that pretends to be an Editorial, or a sermon, or a holiday postcard, etc. Other broad genres can, to a degree, be versatile in this way: e.g. the newspaper editorial cast as an extract from a Jacobean play, the introduction to Marx or Foucault presented as if it were a comic book (for a very powerful 'cross-typing' of this kind look at the Maus 'comics' about the Holocaust), the love poem constructed as if it were part of a car manual ... (the reverse is a little hard to imagine selling).
All of this points to the robust existence of patterns and norms of language use: "when you write a cooking recipe, you normally have this sort of content and you set it out in this sort of way, normally using these kinds of construction... "
Some norms are stronger than others. Hence with type (g) the letter to the bank manager, or a text-type such as an application for a job, there are all kinds of language and content you would surely want to avoid, and a few elements you would almost certainly want to include. And cross-typing (THINKS: "I know! I'll write my letter of application for that Accountancy job in the form of a comedy dialogue between Laurel and Hardy!") is usually avoided.
Quite a lot of the differences we find between text-types can be related to the very different addressees to whom they are directed. Here it is important to think of how the same individual can be many different kinds of addressee. When, on February 14, you receive a card telling you of someone's undying love for you, the wording, format, etc. of the text is very much a reflection of how the addresser views you, what he/she knows of your shared background with them, and so on. On the other hand when on the same day you find a parking ticket slapped on your car, the formal, impersonal, regulative language, rehearsing what you've done wrong and what you must now do, reflects the addresser's very different relations to you, and their need to be fairly explicit in their directions to you. Somewhere between the Valentine card and the parking ticket must be the bouillabaisse recipe: relations between addresser and addressee are likely to be fairly formal (certainly not lovey-dovey!), and clarity and orderliness are important, but the two parties are presumably 'on the same side', whereas the parking ticket needs to get you to cooperate even though you may well feel resistant and annoyed.
3. Present tense, because it is reporting currently valid facts, options, and conditions.
5. There is some degree of 'experiential iconicity' in the order of sections. E.g. wouldn't you want to get to Montserrat, and then look around it, before you moved on to pursuing the possibility of buying or building a house there (section 3)?
6. Yes, I think Getting There could be used independently; this is typical of items in a discourse colony.
7. Quite a lot of the content of Getting There looks rearrangeable; similarly the three addresses within Further Information; rather less shuffling possible in Getting Around.
8. Pretty much my mental picture of a clued-up travel agent - someone of either sex, probably between 30 and 50, urban, neither rich nor poor. But who is the addressee of this information? What of their age, sex, ethnicity, affluence ...?
9. No, it more or less has to be appended to a text extolling the delights of visiting Montserrat.
10. Mainly in the present (aka non-past) tense, since the writer is opining about the way things actually are, and the way things are always likely to be. The past tense is used only when particular past cases (recently or distantly past) are discussed: the Vickers and Cook families, Agamemnon et al. The past tense passages review what someone did or failed to do, and serve to exemplify the author's adjacent comments and interpretations:
Some parents over-protect: look at Mrs. Vickers, who....
Still, the worst is to run on hatred not love: look at Agamemnon and....
11. Sentences like 'When children ...' are generalized truths, sweeping comments about what the speaker asserts is more or less always the case. These are also known as 'generic sentences': they are not particular, not referring solely to individuals like Stephen Vickers. There are many such sentences here since Editorials, like sermons, often seek to generalize from particular topical incidents, try to specify what, in the newspaper's humble opinion, is the lesson to be learnt from that government decision there, this remarkable survival story or sports victory here, or that new science finding over there...
12. The sentence-linkers draw you to treat the article as a unified argument, with one claim explicitly related to the next (via the prefacing of that next claim by the word so, or however). In a sense each linking word says to the reader 'Don't interrupt with your objections, I haven't finished yet, there's another point I have to make first ... '
13. Very frequent. The effect, I think, is to imply that the author is describing 'the way things are', not 'what happened'. The author is describing a series of states or conditions, not a series of events.
14. Sentences are often complex, with clauses inside the S's or C's or O's or A's which are the top-level constituents. E.g. sentence 3:
The injunction he then won has now been overturned on the ground that prison would hardly be an appropriate punishment for overabundant love.
At what I call the top level this is S P + A + P A:
S |
P+ |
A |
+P |
A (to end) |
|
The injunction he then won |
has |
now |
been overturned |
on the ground that prison would hardly be an appropriate punishment for overabundant love. |
The Subject is a typical Noun Phrase, made up of a m, h and q:
m h q
the | injunction | he then won
And the q, he then won, contains a P so must be a clause in itself. It has the structure S-A-P. So that's one bound clause.
And then inside the long Adjunct at the end of the sentence there is another P, would be, so again there must be a clause there too. Again the clause is a kind of q, linked to the head ground. The clause's structure is:
linker |
S |
P+ |
A |
+P |
C (to end) |
|
that |
prison |
would |
hardly |
be |
an appropriate punishment for overabundant love. |
18. Because the word Fuck is powerfully taboo. Philosophers distinguish between 'using' and 'mentioning' a word, mentioning being a kind of citing or reporting of some word that someone else has used: if little Billy runs, tearfully reporting 'Mary just called me a silly sod!', he has not used the naughty word sod but merely mentioned it (it was Mary who used it). Now fuck is one of those words which, it seems, you can't even mention without people feeling that you've used it. So The Times did a nice flanking run around the tricky word. Incidentally The Full Monty has the lads using the word chuff (ing) rather a lot, as a straightforward alternate. You may know of the French slang, Verlan, where various key terms are uttered backwards or with syllables reversed (i.e., l'envers: from which verlan). I wonder if chuffing is one instance of Verlan in contemporary spoken English? There don't seem to be revvy nemmy.
