English Language Elective - Year 10 | Semester 1 2025 - Booklet 1: The Fundamentals of Analysis

SCRAPI: The Fundamentals of Analysis

  • Whenever analyzing a text, identify SCRAPI elements and how Jakobson’s functions support them.
  • Knowledge and application of these elements will be tested.

S - Situational Context

  • Situational context includes everything surrounding the text that determines language choices.
  • Includes:
    1. Language mode: Written and spoken (written can be electronic).
      • Electronic texts (e.g., emails) should be identified as such.
    2. Field: Topic/subject matter of the text (e.g., sport, law, medicine).
      • Semantic field (semantic domain): Lexical set of words sharing semantic associations (e.g., Toyota, Mazda, BMW are from the domain of cars).
    3. Setting: Where and when the text takes place (e.g., classroom, court of law, radio, morning, fifty years ago).
    4. Tenor: Relationship between participants in the communicative exchange.
      • Aspects of the relationship:
        • Level of consideration/type of relationship (positive, negative, neutral): respectful, appreciative, polite, hostile.
        • Social distance (level of intimacy): socially close, socially distant.
        • Status (power or prestige): hierarchical or equal (low/lower - high/higher).
    5. Text type: Each text type has conventions that shape language choices.
      • Social media posts differ from radio interviews or textbooks.
      • Electronic texts often contain hyperlinks or QR codes.

C - Cultural Context

  • Cultural context refers to attitudes, values, and beliefs of the author and audience.
  • Demonstrated intentionally or unintentionally.
  • Registers can be described according to semantic domain.
  • Registers exist for particular professions (e.g., legal register, medical register).
  • Register formality ranges from very formal to very informal.
  • Register may change within a discourse to achieve purposes and intents.

R - Register

  • Ranges from informal to formal (very informal - somewhat informal with some formal features - somewhat formal with informal elements - formal).

A - Audience

  • Intended set of listeners or readers.
  • Context (especially tenor) determines language choices.

PI - Purposes and Intents

  • Purposes: Reasons a text is created (plural).
    • Examples:
      • To establish expertise.
      • To manipulate or obfuscate.
      • To promote social harmony and build rapport.
  • Authorial intents: What the author wants their audience to think or feel with shared information.

Jakobson’s Functions

  • Purposes and intents are often discussed together.
  • Functions of language features support these.
  • Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) believed successful communication relies on choosing language that achieves certain functions.
  • Different functions dominate based on the text’s purposes and intents.

The Six Jakobson's Functions:

  1. Referential:
    • Sharing information objectively.
    • Information doesn’t need to be true.
    • Example: "Sales are up 3% this quarter", "It is raining", "The pale green leaves blew in the wind."
  2. Emotive (Expressive):
    • Conveys addresser’s emotions, feelings, desires, and moods.
    • Gives direct information about the sender’s tone.
    • Example: "I’m excited about the new car I bought!", "I am very sad to say that I lost your phone."
  3. Conative:
    • Focuses on the receiver of the message.
    • Aims to get attention or a reaction from the addressee.
    • Includes language to persuade, encourage, or advise.
    • Example: "Can you help John?", "Come on in", "Buy one get one free!"
  4. Phatic:
    • Establishes a social connection without communicating meaningful information.
    • Used to start/stop conversations or check the connection.
    • Example: "How are you?", "See you later", "Have a great afternoon", "Great day, isn’t it?", "I see"
  5. Poetic:
    • Focuses on the message itself and how it's communicated (the 'packaging').
    • Also known as the aesthetic function.
    • Example: "The swishing of the trees and gentle rattle of the wooden slats…", "Geology rocks but Geography is where it is at."
  6. Metalingual:
    • Talking about language itself (features, definitions, clarifying ambiguity, wordplay).
    • Relevant in translation (foreign words for special meaning).
    • Example: "I couldn’t help but feel a touch of Schadenfreude (a sense of pleasure or joy from the failure of others) when the other team lost by 50 points", "This is the weather forecast."

Assessment Information

  • Part A: Short-Answer Test (30 marks)
  • Part B: SCRAPI paragraph (10 marks)
  • 50 minutes for Part A, 30 minutes for Part B.
  • Based on an unseen short extract of text.
  • Held in Week 8 of Term 1 (week commencing Monday 17 March).