course project – discourse analysis and text
Analyze ONE of the following texts:
TEXT A:
Following the method of Transitivity Analysis, Analyze each clause in the following text. Identify processes by type, participants by role and circumstances (fill out a table similar to p.223 Halliday & Webster) :
“As we meet here today, we announce an end of false promises from generation to generation. We remain a young nation. The time has come to choose our better history. We understand the challenge, and that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. We are the future. You are the hope.”
TEXT B:
Analyze the following text according to the seven standards of textuality. Cover all standards in the analysis and illustrate the presence or lack of these standards with linguistic evidence ‘words’ from the text:
The environment is often felt to be relatively invulnerable because the earth is so big. People tend to assume that the earth is so big that we as human beings can’t possibly have any impact on it. That is a mistake.
In Europe during the summer of 2003, we experienced an extreme heat wave that killed an estimated 20,000 people, and many predict such events will be much more commonplace as a result of increasing temperatures. The anomaly was extreme, particularly in France, with consequences that were well reported in the press. Year-to-year, decade-to-decade there’s variation, but the overall upward trend worldwide since the American Civil War is really clear and really obvious, at least tome.
The trend is very clear. Global warming, the disappearance of the ocean fisheries, the destruction of the rain forests, the atmospheric ozone problem, the extinction crisis, all of these are really symptoms of an underlying cause. The underlying cause is a collision between our civilization and the earth. The relationship between the human species and our planet has been completely
changed. All of our culture, all of our literature, all of our history, everything we’ve learned, was premised on one relationship between the earth and us, and now we have a different one.