Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

3.6 Possibilities for analysis
Unit 3 Analysing units of structure
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

How useful, in our everyday practice of reading, is analysis in terms of units of structure likely to be? Arguably the value of such analysis ranges from better understanding of how a given form comes to have a particular meaning to general ideas about how to create new forms that build on but extend existing ones.

In many areas of analysis, little work has been done on naming and justifying use of relevant units or working out their possible combinations. It may often be the case, therefore, that when you analyse a text you must invent your own units and your own rules of combination, and justify them in terms of new ideas and insights they make possible. There are only the beginnings, for example, of a grammar of contemporary popular music. In creating such a grammar, we would need units such as intro, verse, hook, riff, chorus, bridge, fade and mix. This unit has suggested that, even though such a grammar might require new units and rules of combination, the procedure for developing it would follow broadly the same operations (including tests of replacement and movement to identify units and how they function) that have long been used in descriptions of English grammar.