More about Text, Textuality and Discourse Analysis

Study of language, like any other discipline, has naturally been developing ever since its inception. But it assumed an accelerated pace from the early twentieth century onwards with two or more paradigm-shifting outlooks, among which the ‘socio-contextual surge onto the consideration of language functioning’ led to the emergence of an approach which came to be known as ‘discoursal’. Within the framework of this outlook, new trends and concepts as well as new definitions have evolved in Applied Linguistics in the last five decades: discourse, text, meaning, function, speech act, linguistic vs. communicative competence, discourse analysis, cohesion, coherence, genre, register, etc. This paper, after clarifying its position on the concept of “discourse vs. text”, will set out to discuss the dimensions of discoursal perspective on language, to examine the perspectives of variations in textual presentation of discourse (or rather “the construal of context”), to engage in some discourse-analytic deliberations on both production and comprehension phases, and to consider some reasons, or rather applications, for discourse analysis.

کلیدواژه ها:

discourse ، text ، discourse analysis ، context ، function ، textuality