Chapter 5. Functional-pragmatic text analysis

Abstract

Drawing on Charles Bally’s distinction between dictum and modus, the final chapter deals with the pragmatic analysis of propositions identified at the previous step. Propositions can be expressed by an attribute linking together a number of objects or by a single word (implicit proposition). Implicit propositions should be made explicit, i.e. missing objects should be brought out. Each proposition is attributed a conceptual type. The authors posit four types of propositions, namely, fact, opinion, evaluation and expression of will. While the distinction between fact and opinion is common enough, evaluation emphasizes the emotional, or expressive, aspect of an utterance, and the expression of will has to do with persuasive speech acts. Next, relations between propositions, both local and distant, are established, which makes it possible to bring them together within a rhetorical text structure. The units of rhetorical structure are quite different from both the syntactic and communicative ones and vary depending on the its type (statement, persuasion, directive, etc.).