A Study of the Textualisation Process through Linguistic Analysis of the Written Performances

Abstract

In this paper, the authors take a multidisciplinary approach to textualisation, combining linguistic, textual genetic, and psycholinguistic theories and methods to examine how a text is formed or the textualisation process. They concentrate their efforts on the linguistic exploration of bursts of written language (i.e., the sequences of texts created between two pauses), which are regarded as performance units in and of themselves. In order to conduct their analyses, they use keystroke logging tools to record the writing process in real-time. This results in two corpora: the first contains social reports about children at risk written by professional writers, and the second contains academic reports written by students for a Discourse Analysis course. The first part introduces some of the theoretical issues that serve as the foundation for the Authors' point of view. The second part introduces the criteria for categorising bursts and the theoretical foundations on which they are based. The data are analysed in the third and fourth parts, including a detailed description of the burst classifications. Finally, during the fifth chapter, we examine the possibility of bursts as prefabricated performance units that may be routinely repeated and the variations between production and revision bursts.