171
Examination
Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality
Clause I so that/since/in ordertolto Clause 2
Even the two exceptions fit partially into this pattern, because the connection between them is one of purpose: the first sentence of the second paragraph begins 'The purpose of this is to', where 'this' refers back to the last sentence of the first paragraph. In fact the pattern of sentences being linked in terms of purpose or reason as well as clauses within sentences, is repeated throughout the sample, The message that comes across is one of reassurance:
You will be weighed so that your subseque.nt weight gain can be assessed. Your height will be small women .on the whole have a slightly smaller than - which is not surprising. A complete phvsical examination Will then be carried out which will include checking your breasts, heart, lungs, blood pressure, abdomen and pelvis. . . .
The purpose of this is to identify any abnormalities which might be present, but which so far have not caused you any
A vaginal examination will .enable the pelvis to assessed in order to check the condition of the uterus, cervix and the vagina. A cervical smear is also often taken at this time to exclude any early pre-cancerous change which rarely may be present.
We will begin by analysing certain of cohesion .and sentence structure in this sample; this WIll provide a way into looking at the sort of argumentation that,is,used, sort of standards of rationality it presupposes; this m turn WIll give.some insight into the sorts of social identity that are constructed m th,e in particular the medico-scientific voice and ethos that It contains,
Let us begin with the way in which sentences are constructed inthe section headed 'Examination', which consists of two para-graphs, each of three sentences, With the exception of the last sentence of the first paragraph and the first sentence the second paragraph, each sentence consists of two (i.e, ,are simple sentences: see P: 75 above) WIth a conjunction which marks purpose or reason. Schematically,
Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality
The essential aim of antenatal care is to ensure that you through pregnancy and labour in the peak of condition.
ably, therefore, it involves a series of examinations and throughout the course of your pregnancy. As mentioned above, antenatal care will be provided either by your local hospital or your general practitioner, frequently working in cooperation the hospital.
It is important to attend for your first examination as early as possible, since there may be minor disorders that the doctor can correct which will benefit the rest of your pregnancy. More particularly, having seen your doctor and booked in at a local hospital. you will usually receive the assurance that everything is proceeding normally.
Your first visit involves a comprehensive review of your health through childhood and also right up to the time you became pregnant. Just occassionally women may suffer from certain medical disorders of which they are unaware - such as high blood pressure, diabetes and kidney disease. It is important for these problems to be identified at an early stage since they may seriously influence the course of the pregnancy.
The doctor and midwife will also want to know about all your previous health problems, as well as discussing your social cir-cumstances. We do know that social conditions can influence the outcome of the pregnancy. For this reason, they will ask you details about your housing, as well as your present job. In addi-tion they will need to know if you smoke, drink alcohol or if you are taking any drugs which have been prescribed by your doctor or chemists. All of these substances can sometimes affect the development of a baby.
170
contrasting extracts from Pregnancy Book (Health Educatio Council 1984), a similar publication produced by the Education Council. (I have omitted a subsection entitled
of pregnancy', which occurs in the original before the sulbsecti()1'I headed 'Examination',)
everything. that antenatal care is there for a good reason. It IS clear who IS being reassured, but what is less clear' precisely who is doing the reassuring. IS
Let us try to establish this by looking at the participants:
who are participating in this as a piece of discourse practice those who participate in the processes of antenatal care that
being depicted. The former are (i) readers of the text, who will be subject to (as pregnant women) or
involved ID (as partners) antenatal care; and (ii) the producers of the no author is identified, but an editor (a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology) and editorial team are named.
parti.cipants in are (i) pregnant women, and (ii) staff. The relationship berween readers as discourse parti-cipants and women as partiparti-cipants in antenatal care is obvious:
most of the former are about to become the latter. The rela-tionship the producers of the text and participants in antenatal care IS rather less obvious; in principle, the text produc-ers could adopt the pproduc-erspective of the pregnant women, or of the medical staff, or indeed of neither.
In this case, the text producers are clearly identified with the medical staff. The most explicit evidence for this is in the second paragraph of the section headed 'The first visit'. The first and third sentences of that paragraph predict what the medical staff 'want to know' and 'ask'. The second sentence is an explana-tion of why they ask, but the scientific knowledge that medical staff ground their practices in is significandy worded as what 'we'
'we' a slippage berween text producers as parti-cipantsID the discourse process, and medical staff as participants in the antenatal care process.
There is, however, one instance of distancing berween the rwo the second sentence in the first paragraph under 'Examination';
the tagged-on comment 'which is not surprising' comes across as the lifeworld voice of the prospective patient, or indeed of the staff in their non-professional capacities (recall Mishler's of voices in his analysis of the sample of medical discourse discussed above, p. 143). But notice the con-trast in voices berween this and the second clause of the sentence ('since small women on the whole have a slightly smaller pelvis than tall women'), which is a reason clause. This is in the medical
Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality 173
'Voice: 'pelvis' is a medical term, the clause consists of an author-itative assertion, which we take to be grounded in medico-'scientific evidence.It is also far more typical of the extract as a most reason clauses are in the medical voice. The hedging the assertion ('on the whole') is interesting: on the one hand its agueness suggests a shift into the voice of the lifeworld, while on e other it marks the cautious and circumspect ethos we associate
scientific medicine.
Clearly, those doing the reassuring are the medical staff. The of reason or purpose, consistently cast in the voice of give the sort of rationalization and argumentation one expect from medical staff, which contributes to the con-strUction of medico-scientific ethos (see p. 143 above) in the ex-tract. Compare the following extract from the Pregnancy Book:
'Throughout your pregnancy you will have regular check-ups ... This is to make sure that both you and the baby are fit and to check that the baby is developing properly, and, as far as possible to prevent anything going wrong . . .' (my The italicized expressions are evidently closer to the vorce of the Iifeworld than equivalent ones in The Baby Book, but I feel nevertheless that there is an ambivalence of voice in the Pregnancy Book.The reason for this is medical staff often do shift partly into a lifeworld voice when talking to patients (recall sample 2 above, pp. 144-9), and the italicized expressions could be used by medical staff. It therefore remains unclear whether the producer of the Pregnancy Book is writing from the patient's perspective, or from that of (a 'modernizing' position among) medical staff.
Further evidence of a merging of text producers with medical staff in The Baby Book extract comes from its modality (see pp. 158-62 above). In the first paragraph the.
'Examination', all three sentences are modalized with WIll, which gives a meaning of categorical prediction - 'this is what will happen' - and suggests that the text producer is writing from a position of insider knowledge. Similarly with 'can' (e.g. 'these substances can sometimes affect... ') and 'may' ('any early pre-cancerous change which rarely may be present'), where the text producer makes expert assertions about medical possibilities. The frequency adverbials ('sometimes', 'rarely'), if anything, add to Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality
172
175
(SundayTimesMagazine,21 1990) Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality
Consider for a moment why diplomats and company directors world over choose to travel S-c1ass. Perhaps it's because Mercedes-Benz flagship conveys presence without courting ostentation. Its styling complements the demeanour of those who . have nothing to prove.
is advertisement opens witn a question - answer sequence, more precisely an indirect question (a request to the reader a question) followed by a (two-sentence) suggested assible answer; this is a rhetorical schema widely used in adver-It is likely that different rhetorical modes, such as types of
are distinctive in the schemata they use.
HaIliday (1985: 202-27) provides a detailed framework for some major types of functional relationship between clauses (see also Hoey 1983), though it does not include the
·ql1estion-answer relation in the last extract. A version of the same framework can be used for functional relations between whole (pp. 303-9). In broad outline Halliday distinguishes the three main types of relation between clauses as 'elaboration', 'extension' and 'enhancement'. In elaboration, one clause (sent-ence) 'elaborates on the meaning of another by further specifying or describing it', that is, rewording it, exemplifying it, or clarifying it. An example of the latter is the last sentence of the second paragraph of the antenatal care text, beginning More particularly'. In extension, one clause (sentence) 'extends the meaning of another by adding something new toit'. This may be a matter of straight addition (marked with 'and', 'moreover', etc.), an adversative relation (marked with 'but', 'yet', 'however', etc.), or variation (marked with 'or', 'alternatively', 'instead' etc.). In enhancement, one clause (sentence) 'enhances the meaning of another by qualifying it in a number of possible ways: by refer-ence to time, place, manner, cause or condition'. The main rela-tions between clauses and sentences here temporal relations (A then B, A after B, A when B, A while B, etc. - taking A and B be to clauses or sentences); causal relations (such as the relations of reason and purpose identified in the analysis of The Baby Book); conditional relations (if A then B); spatial relations (A where B); and comparisons (A like B, A similarly B).
Animportant variable between text types is the extent to which Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality
174
the authoritativeness of these assertions. Notice also 'it' . rtam ,to' (openiopenmg sentence m the second paragraph) andIS
(second sentence of the first paragraph). Use of
medical vocabulary (e.g, 'pre-cancerous') strengthens the 'i id '
effect. nSI er
To. up, an analysis of cohesion in this sample into Its mode of argumentation and mode of rationality
!nto the voice and ethos that are mIt. from this example, text types differ in the of that set up between their clauses, and in the
of and such differences may be of
ideological slgmficance. These differences in cohesion combi with others to give differences in the overall 'texture'
1985: of text types in the overall mode of structu a text. Other dimensions of variation include discussed m the next section, ways in which 'given information:
by the as known or established)
IS from new information' (Halliday 1985: 271-86' QUirk al. 19?2: 237-43), and ways of foregrounding or
particular of the text (Hoey 1983). One aspect of discursive change which IS perhaps less obvious than others but may be worth investigating, is changes in texture' and cohesion, Itthe case, for example, that types of public
informa-colomzed advertising (e.g. government publicity on issues I .e AIDS) mamfest. changes in these respects, and if so how might such changes link to changes in modes of rationality and ethos?
. I.n a passage already quoted, Foucault refers to 'various rhe-toncal sc.hemata according to which groups of statements may be (how descriptions, deductions, definitions, whose charactenzes the architecture of a text, are linked together) 57)".At one level, analysis of cohesion focuses .functional relations between clauses, and can be used to such 'rhetorical schemata' in various types of text. For m The Baby Book extract a predominant pattern is a description (of what happen to the pregnant woman) fol-lowed. by an explanation (o.f the medical reasons for this). The extract, the opening of a magazine advertisement, is qune dIfferently structured:
176 Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality between clauses and sentences are explicitly difference The Baby Bookand the
IS causal (reasons and purposes) are generally
In the former - there are, for example, like so that', 'since' - and this explicitness seems contribute to the clear dominance in the former of the scientific voice and ethos.
, variability explicitness also points to the need to levels analysis of cohesion: the analysis of srve functional such as those described above, and analysis of explicir cohesive markers on the surface of the such as the conjunctives just referred to. The latter are of attention, not only to determine to what extent
are explicitly marked, but also because there significant differences between text types in the types of markers ther tend to favour. Halliday (1985: 288-9) distinguishes four main types of surface cohesive marking: 'reference' 'ellipsl ,conjuncnon',' " and ' l ' a l 'exic cohesion', Again, I can give only a, I S , broad of these here. Reference is a matter of referring back to earlierpart of a text, forward to a of the text that is coming, or to the situation or wider cultural COntext of the text, such,as 'personal pronouns, demonstratives, and the definite article, Ellipsisleaves out material that is recover-able from another part of the text, or replaces it with a substitute word, and so makes a link between the two parts of the (for ,ellipSIS of'spades' in the second of this Why didn t you lead a spade?' - 'I hadn't got any').
has been quite extensively referred to: it is conjuncnvewords and expressions, including what are traditionally called 'conjunctions' ('since' 'if' 'and' t )
11' . . di " e c. as
we , conjunctive a juncts' (Halliday 1985: 303) or 'conjuncts' (QUirk et al. 1972: 520-32) such as 'therefore' 'in addition' ,.
other wor s. .eXI.cd'L icaleo esion IS cohesionhesi " the repitition, I n
words, the linking of words and expressions. in meaning rela-nons (see Leech 1981) such as synonymy (sameness of meaning) or hyponymy (where the meaning of one 'includes' the meaning the the linking of words and expressions which (Halliday 1966), that is, belong to the same semantic domain and tend to eo-occur (for example, 'pipe' 'smoke'
'tobacco'). ' ,
Text Analysis: Constructing Social Reality 177 It would be misleading to regard these types of surface cohesive
as simply objective properties of texts. Cohesive markers to be interpreted by text interpreters as part of the process constructing coherent readings of texts (see above, pp. 83-cohesion is one factor in coherence. For example, one specify which lexical items in a text collocate, without interpreters' interpretations of texts in this regard, that is, which items interpreters actually discern relations be-Yet cohesive markers also need to be seen dynamically the perspective of the text producer: text producers actively up cohesive relations of sorts in the process of positioning the interpreter as subject. Consequently, cohesion seen in these dynamic terms may turn out to be a significant
of ideological 'work' going on in a text.
The magazine advertisement given earlier (p. 175 above) illus-trates these points. A coherent interpretation of this passage depends on a lot of inferential work, which centres upon reconstructing the collocational cohesive links set up by the text producer - between 'diplomats and company directors', 'conveys presence without courting ostentation', and 'the demeanour of those who have nothing to prove'. That is, one can sense of the text by assuming that conveying presence without courting ostentation is a characteristic of diplomats and company directors (transferred here to die car), and that diplomats and company directors possess 'demeanour', and have nothing to prove. Notice that these collocational relationships are not ones you would find in a dictionary (unlike, for example, the relationship between 'dog and 'bark'); they are set up in this text by the text producer. In setting them up, the producer is also assuming an interpreter who is 'capable' of picking up these collocational relationships; and in so far as interpreters are successfully placed in that position, the text succeeds in doing ideological work in constructing subjects for whom these connections are common sense (see the discus-sions of subjection above, pp. 90-1 and 133-6).