Theme 23. Text and discourse

Plan

1. The nature of text.

2. The nature of discourse.

3. The conditions on which a discourse can be derived from a text.

4. The notion of context and its components.

When we think of a text, we typically think of a stretch of language complete in itself and of some considerable extent: a business letter, a leaflet, a news report, a recipe, and so on. However, though this view of texts may be commonsensical, there appears to be a problem when we have to define units of language which consist of a single sentence, or even a single word, which are all the same experienced as texts because they fulfill the basic requirement of forming a meaningful whole in their own right. Typical examples of such small-scale texts are public notices like ‘KEEP OF THE GRASS’, ‘KEEP LEFT’, ‘KEEP OUT’, ‘DANGER’, ‘RAMP AHEAD’, ‘SLOW’, and ‘EXIT’.

It is obvious that these minimal texts are meaningful in themselves, and therefore do not need a particular structural patterning with other language units. In other words, they are complete in terms of communicative meaning. So, if the meaningfulness of texts does not depend on their linguistic size, what else does it depend on?

Consider the road sigh ‘RAMP AHEAD’. When you are driving a car and see this sign, you interpret it as a warning that there will be a small hump on the road ahead of you and that it is therefore wise to slow down when you drive over it. From this it follows that you recognize a piece of language as a text, not because of its length, but because of its location in a particular context. And if you are familiar with the text in that context, you know what the message is intended to be.

But now suppose you see the same road sign in the collection of a souvenir-hunter! Of course, you still know the original meaning of the sign, but because of its dissociation from its ordinary context of traffic control, you are no longer able to act on its original intention. Furthermore, prompted by its alien situational context, you might be tempted to think up some odd meaning for the otherwise familiar sign, particularly when you see it in relation to other ‘souvenirs’ in the collection. (Needless to say, this is probably exactly what the souvenir-hunter wants you to do.) From this example of alienation of context we can then conclude that, for the expression of its meaning, a text is dependent on its use in an appropriate context.

We may go even further and assert that the meaning of a text does not come into being until it is actively employed in a context of use. This process of activation of a text by relating it to a context of use is what we call discourse. To put it differently, this contextualization of a text is actually the reader’s (and in case of spoken text, the hearer’s) reconstruction of the writer’s (or speaker’s) intended message, that is, his or her communicative act or discourse. In these terms, the text is the observable product of the writer’s or speaker’s discourse, which in turn must be seen as the process that has created it. The text may be in some written form, or in the form of a sound recording, or it may be unrecorded speech. But in whatever form it comes, a reader (or hearer) will search the text for cues or signals that may help to reconstruct the writer’s (or speaker’s) discourse. However, just because he or she is engaged in a process of reconstruction, it is always possible that the reader (or hearer) infers a different discourse from the text than the one the writer (or speaker) had intended. Therefore, one might also say that the inference of discourse meaning is largely a matter of negotiation between writer (speaker) and reader (hearer) in a contextualized social interaction.

So we can suggest that a text can be realized by any piece of language as long as it is found to record a meaningful discourse when it is related to a suitable context of use.

At this point, it will have become clear that in order to derive a discourse from a text we have to explore two different sites of meaning: on the one hand, the text’s intrinsic linguistic or formal properties (its sounds, typography, vocabulary, grammar, and so on) and on the other hand, the extrinsic contextual factors which are taken to affect its linguistic meaning. These two interacting sites of meaning are the concern of two fields of study: semantics is the study of formal meanings as they are encoded in the language of texts, that is, independent of writers (speakers) and readers (hearers) set in a particular context, while pragmatics is concerned with the meaning of language in discourse, that is, when it is used in an appropriate context to achieve particular aims. Pragmatic meaning is not, we should note, an alternative to semantic meaning, but complementary to it, because it is inferred from the interplay of semantic meaning with context.

The notion of context has already been introduced, if somewhat informally, in the previous chapters. We now need to be more precise. It will be recalled that we distinguished two kinds of context: an internal linguistic context built up by the language patterns inside the text, and an external non-linguistic context drawing us to ideas and experiences in the world outside the text. The latter is a very complex notion because it may include any number of text-external features influencing the interpretation of a discourse. Perhaps we can make the notion more manageable by specifying the following components (obviously, the list is by no means complete):

1. the text type, or genre (for example, an election poster, a recipe, a sermon)
2. its topic, purpose, and function
3. the immediate temporary and physical setting of the text
4. the text’s wider social, cultural, and historical setting
5. the identities, knowledge, emotions, abilities, beliefs, and assumptions of the writer (speaker) and reader (hearer)
6. the relationships holding between the writer (speaker) and reader (hearer)
7. the association with other similar or related text types (intertextuality).

This has been an attempt to delineate what might be called a ‘communicative triangle’, encompassing a first-person party (an addresser), a text as the material manifestation of a discourse, and a second-person party (an addressee). All three are indispensable elements in a dynamic contextualized interaction. It is convenient to talk about text, when our analysis is focused on the intrinsic linguistic properties of the text, without considering its contextual factors. On the other hand, we need the term discourse when our analysis is not only concerned with linguistic features, but also with non-linguistic aspects such as the extra-textual context of communication in which the discourse is situated. In this sense, the term discourse takes text and context together because they are seen as interacting generators of meaning.

References:

1. Александрова О. В., Комова Т. А. Современный английский язык. Морфология и синтаксис. = Modern English Grammar: Morphology and Syntax: учеб. пособие / О. В. Александрова, Т. А. Комова. – М.: ИЦ «Академия», 2007. – С. 138-140; 173-174.

2. Прохоров Ю. Е. Действительность. Текст. Дискурс: Учеб. пособие – 2-е изд. испр. / Ю. Е. Прохоров. – М.: Флинта. Наука. 2006. – С. 9-72.

3. Verdonk, Peter. Stylistics / Oxford Introductions to Language Study. Series Editor H. Y. Widdowson. / Peter Verdonk. – Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. – P. 7-17.