Many problems and some techniques of text analysis

Abstract

The state of the art in text analysis and text comprehension research, especially in theoretical work in linguistics, psychology, and artificial intelligence, has not gotten much beyond subjective methods of analysis of critical texts, often of a trivial size and often selected because features of such texts illustrate nicely the theoretical point being argued by the analyst. This paper represents an attempt to assist text researchers in sharpening methods of analysis by looking for a number of discourse properties on different levels simultaneously. Close subjective analysis of longer texts is argued to assist in evaluating past theories and discovering new classes of discourse phenomena, thus advancing the state of the art in text comprehension research. This paper explores two children' texts from the standpoint of a plans analysis, a story grammar analysis, an analysis of information structure, and analyses of problems connected with conjunction, anaphora, and point of view.