Today's tediously titled top tips will focus on analytical frameworks for ENGA3, in particular the Section B Language Discourses question.
As I was saying in yesterday's post about Section B, the key difference between the two sections on the paper is that Section A deals with language as it's actually used - in different times, different places and by different people - while Section B deals with language as something to be discussed, argued about and debated. So, in terms of analysis, you can apply many of the same frameworks - word, phrase, clause and discourse analysis - to texts in both sections, but Section B really lends itself to a Critical Discourse Analysis approach.
In effect, this means that you're using language analysis to work out the ideological position a text producer is taking in discussing a language issue. So, this could mean you're using language analysis to work out how a writer is using the following:
- pronouns to address the reader and position him/herself in relation to the ideal reader (direct 2nd person address, inclusive 1st person plural, maybe some synthetic personalisation)
- lexical formality to suggest closeness to the ideal reader/distance and expertise
- modality to suggest elements of certainty or doubt, sometimes in the form of modal verbs, but also modal adverbs
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| Norman Fairclough: the daddy of Critical Discourse Analysis |
...in an article for The Daily Mail on Americanisms entering English, the columnist Matthew Engel, seems to humbly and self-mockingly position himself as out of touch by saying “Old buffers like me have always complained about the process, and we have always been defeated”. Should we take such a move at face value? Perhaps not. Engel goes on in the article to stridently berate the UK for adopting what he calls “ugly Americanisms”: “Nowadays, people have no idea where American ends and English begins. And that's a disaster for our national self-esteem. We are in danger of subordinating our language to someone else's - and with it large aspects of British life”. That doesn’t sound too much like the stance of a man who’s labelled himself an “old buffer”, but the words of a man who feels he’s still got battles to fight and wars to win (if not, home-runs to hit). His self-effacing positioning earlier on helps him appeal to his reader as a gentle, even rather defeated and pessimistic, sort of character, which his subsequent warnings and call to arms belie.If you're still working on revision for this exam, you could do worse than look back through a few of the texts we've flagged up as being of Language Discourses interest and think about how you could analyse short chunks of them to see how the writers are positioning themselves through their language choices and how they're representing the particular language topic.
For example, this article by Lindsay Johns is fantastic for a bit of analysis, not only for the way he presents and positions himself but in the way he presents language to us as "an incredibly rich inheritance": a noun phrase that casts language as like a solid object passed unchanging from generation to generation. Is that the reality? Well, you might argue that it changes all the time and isn't something that is the gift of one person to give to another but something we should all share and contribute to.
In the simple sentence containing this phrase ("The English language is an incredibly rich inheritance.") there's no modality to suggest doubt, only certainty. This is the kind of analysis that can really help you in the first bullet point for Section B, because it links the AO1 language detail (words, phrases & sentences in this case) to the AO3 interpretation of meaning and discussion of representation.
There are plenty of good articles to practise this approach on, so have a look through the links here for a few examples.
