The Model of Functional Analysis of a Text

Table 1

The MFAT

№	Function	Сontents	Markers
	The Informative Function The ability of the text to inform the reader	(a)Extra linguistic and (b)linguistic information	(a)Facts, ideas, realia intertextual units: realia allusions, quotations (b) Sounding, Rhythm, Word-usage, Morphological and syntactical characteristics. Text typology
	The Communicative Function (The ability of the text to communicate with the reader)	Intermediate relations between the author, the text (in some cases characters) and the reader	The markers of the author’s presence (personal pronouns, the mode of the narration: first or third person narrative) subjective modality, deixis (Chronotop), (locatives and temperatives)
	The Emotive Function The ability of the text to impact the reader	The Mode of Expressiveness	Words of assessment (evaluative connotation) Figures of Speech, Metaphoric and Metonymic expressions, Stylistic Devices
	The Aesthetic Function (The ability of the text to evoke the feeling of pleasure or disgust)	Integrity, Harmony, Clarity (Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas)	Wholeness, opposites, logical development (means of surface and inner cohesion: logical hooks, semantic and syntactic parallelisms, semantic fields, theme and rheme development, associative development

2.2.Preliminary steps: Below this model will be described in detail. Yet, first and foremost, it should be noted that the implementation of this model demands (1) a preliminary close –reading procedure to define a stylistic register and grammatical status of every word as well as syntactic characteristics of the text and its type. (2) If a period of the text under analysis is known, it will be necessary to have an idea of its epistemological (conceptual), ideological, aesthetic and genre codes, as well as of the individual rhetoric code of the author (to define the latter could be formulated as a purpose of the analysis). In this case it would advisable to do some encyclopedia search. (3) Besides, to succeed in text decoding and interpreting it will be necessary to compress the text (to write a précis, to extract preliminary factual and conceptual information [1]). (4) Free interpretation and sharing impressions in class will be very useful. It will make easier to formulate the purpose of the analysis and to define variants of implicit information, the invariant of which could be defined with the help of functional method of text analysis.

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS:

3.1 Model Description: The Informative Function

Let us assume that the borders between functions in the model are conventional. It means that functions as well as their markers may overlap and the level of “overlapping” depends upon the type and genre form of the text. Anyway a communicative act of a text begins with the process of information presentation and extracting (Intellection), therefore the informative functions, taken as an ability of the text to inform the reader is considered the most important. Any text can present extralinguistic information whose markers are facts, ideas, realia, allusions and quotations. Surface linguistic information is marked by sound scheme, rhythm, and textual prosody (if verses are being analyzed) as well as by vocabulary usage, its morphological characteristics and syntactical characteristics of a text. We shall demonstrate how functions work taking for the decoding a rather complicated passage that brings James Joyce’s “Ulysses” to the end.

3.2.Text to demonstrate how functions work:

". (1).. Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild maintains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sort of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature (2) it is as for them saying theres no God I would give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first they go howling for the priest and they dying and why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow (3) the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I new I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the see and the sky (4) I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and father and old captain Groves and sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier(5) and the sentry in front of the governers house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devils knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Lardy Sharons and the poor donkey slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the cart of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with an old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras (6) the whatchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibralter as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. " [U, 931 933) [2]

3.3. Free interpretation and sharing stage:

Even if a student does not know what ideas, events and people brought James Joyce to write his novel (Ulysses) in a “stream-of- consciousness technique”, even if a student has read only some fragments of it, she or he, being a student of Letters will be able to extract a certain amount of information out of this passage. It is not demanded from a student to plunge into James Joyce’s draft versions, notebooks and letters, to read his contemporaries’ reminiscences and the variety of critical works and interpretations, though the knowledge of these would be of great help. We start from point that a text itself, even as complicated as Joycean, could provide all necessary information, as the author offers to the reader not his draft versions and notebooks but his final variant.

At first reading a peculiar punctuation will attract readers’ attention. A student will not find familiar full-stops, commas, colons, semicolons, and dashes. The absence of accepted punctuation marks will cause the supposition that that the author (Joyce) had an unusual concept of the text (a preliminary conceptual information) and an extraordinary intention. Further scrutiny of the text will help to extract textual linguistic information – a student will be able to define general features of a text type – reflection, inner monologue with descriptive elements. Further, the process of extracting linguistic and extralinguistic information will go simultaneously, though it will be more convenient to describe the results of text scrutiny separately. Thus, having compressed the text, a student will understand that it presents an inner monologue of a love-seeking woman in her late thirties who recollects Gibraltar as a heaven-like place of her birth and youth and romantic love. All this could be regarded as preliminary factual information.

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS:

3.4. Systematization of realia:

Earlier it was pointed out that realia could be regarded a distinguishing marker of textual extralinguistic information. To understand how a realia functions it will be reasonable to perform a sort of classification. Such classification could be offered in the form of a table.

Table 2:

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