NOTES ON TEXT INTERPRETATION

A conference abstract (Ukr. тези доповіді) is a short account of an oral presentation proposed to the organizers of a conference. It is a widespread and important genre that plays a significant role in promoting new knowledge within scientific communities, both national and international.

Nowadays, Ukrainian scholars often try to submit abstracts to international conferences. For many of our academics, the conference abstract is a kind of a "pass" to the world research communities that provides, if accepted, various opportunities for professional contacts and communication.

The abstracts submitted for international and major national conferences are usually reviewed (sometimes blind-reviewed, i.e. considered without seeing the names of the authors) by conference committees. Conference abstracts, therefore, participate in the competition for acceptance and need to impress reviewing committees; that is why they may be written in a somewhat promotional, self-advertising manner. A dominant feature of conference abstracts is so-called "interestingness" created by the novelty of a topic and its presentation in an interesting for the potential audience way.

Conference abstracts have certain textual characteristics. They are usually of one-page length (200-300 words) and consist of three paragraphs on average. Sometimes there may be 2-5 pages depending on the requirements suggested by the conference committee, the journal traditions, the topic itself, the price for publication etc.

The conference abstract tends to have such basic steps (although certain deviations from this structure are quite possible). These steps, which may be realized by certain strategies (given below in parenthesis), are as follows:

1. Outlining the research field (by reference to established knowledge/importance claim/previous research).

2. Justifying a particular research/study (by indicating a gap in the previous research/by counter-claiming/by question-posing/by continuing a tradition).

3. Introducing the paper to be presented at the conference.

4. Summarizing the paper (by giving its brief overview).

5. Highlighting its outcome/results (by indicating the most important results or their possible applications and/or implications).

The first, the second, and the third steps of the conference abstract are, in fact, identical to the three initial steps of the research paper Introduction. The fourth step is a brief overview of the conference paper structured with the help of meta-textual phrases. The final step – Highlighting the outcome – often only indicates the most important results and their possible applications and implications. Most typically, the first and the second steps are realized in the initial paragraph of a text, while the following introduces and summarizes the paper, and the concluding one highlights the outcome.

As the fist three parts of the conference abstract are similar to the first three steps of the research paper Introductions, you may use the appropriate useful phrases given in the previous lectures for writing your conference abstracts. Also, meta-textual patterns, which realize Step 3 in the research paper Introduction, can be used in the Summarizing the paper part of the conference abstract. Below are useful phrases which realize Step 5 of the conference abstract:

Finally, … implications will be drawn from the results obtained.

The paper closes with several suggestions on …

The paper implies a number of practical recommendations to …

The paper will conclude by …

As a final point, a conclusion involving … will be offered.

NOTES ON TEXT INTERPRETATION

(a manual for graduate students)

Kamianets-Podilskiy

CONTENTS

Text Interpretation as a Branch of Linguistic Studies

1. The concept of text interpretation.

2. Approaches to text definition.

Interpretation is the process establishing, either simultaneously (known as simultaneous interpretation) or consecutively (known as consecutive interpretation), oral or gestural communications between two or more speakers who are not able to use the same set of symbols. By definition it is available as a method only in those cases where there is a need for interpretation – if an object (of art, of speech, etc.) is obvious to begin with, it cannot draw an interpretation. In any case the term interpretation is ambiguous, as it may refer to both an ongoing process and a result.

Interpretation is a term used in informal education settings to describe any communication process designed to reveal meanings and relationships of cultural and natural heritage through first hand involvement with an object, artifact, landscape or site. This is primarily known as heritage interpretation.

An interpretation can be the part of a presentation or portrayal of information altered in order to conform to a specific set of symbols. This may be a spoken, written, pictorial, mathematical, sculptural, cinematic, geometric or any other form of language. The purpose of interpretation would normally be to increase the possibility of understanding.

Interpretation crisscrosses cognitive theory and provides explaining and commenting on the meaning, thus it is oriented on the language in its dynamics, i.e. speech.

The term “text” is used referred to different spheres of life thus it possesses a set of dictionary definitions representing usually a single narrowed meaning.

Text (Lat. textus – to weave, construct, compose) has multiple meanings depending on the context of its use:

In language, text is a broad term for something that contains words to express something.

In linguistics a text is a communicative act, fulfilling the constitutive and regulative principles of textuality. Both speech and written language, or language in other media can be seen as a text within linguistics.

In literary theory a text is the object being studied, whether it be a novel, a poem, a film, an advertisement, or anything else with a semiotic component. The broad use of the term derives from the rise of semiotics in the 1960s and was solidified by the later cultural studies of the 1980s, which brought a corresponding broadening of what it was one could talk about when talking about literature. In this respect it may relate to the corresponding term “discourse”.

In academics, text is often used as a short form for textbook.

In communicative linguistics, text is a verbal record of a communicative event.

The difference in understanding of text in linguistics and literature studies lies in the approach to its analysis. In literature studies it is considered to be an aesthetic phenomenon, in linguistics it is a verbal object.

We have to know that an object becomes the one (an object) when it suffers from some activity directed on it.

A subject is some component, side, aspect of the object; it’s a point of view from where the object is seen.

So it may be concluded that literature studies and linguistics analyze the same object but different subjects.

So, text interpretation focuses on the revealing of the content the author had inserted into the text. The interpretation of texts began as early as ancient Greece, in the time of the early philosophers and poets. By the time of Plato, in regards to education, studying the interpretation of Greek poetry was a foundation of learning.

The main task of text interpreting as a research is to draw as much information from the text as possible, but not to cross the limit of interpretation.

There are 3 things that allow interpretation to occur, and these are all interlinked and interdependable. These 3 factors are the writer, the text and the reader. Through the act of interpretation the reader is the person creating meaning, and the writer’s original intended meaning is often overlooked or ignored. It is the reader who produces meaning by participating in a complexity of socially constructed and enforced practices. From this, interpretation produces values and meanings that are outcomes of an active process and that the process always occurs within specific cultural and political contexts and has a direct link to the world that the reader lives in.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1376