Text, context and discourse

Text and Discourse. Types of Context and Contextual Relationships.

LECTURE 15

Main points:

1. Text, context and discourse.

2. Levels of contextual abstraction.

3. Types of context.

4. Contextual relationships.

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Current thinking among translation theorists stresses that the translated text is a new creation which derives from close and careful reading; a reconstruction rather than a copy. In contrast the translator / reader focuses on the word and sentence as process, as possibilities toward meaning. Translators always have to rethink the web (тканина) of interrelationships in a text before any translation becomes feasible. (Biguenet and Schulte, 1989).

“Text” and “discourse” are used interchangeably by some linguists, while others reserve the first for written documents and the second for speech.

The text is a structured sequence of linguistic expressions forming a unitary whole, in contrast with discourse which is a far broader “structured event manifest in linguistic (and other) behavior.” (Edmondson, 1998)

Oral communication, in the same way as written, always takes place in a certain context and communicative situation. This situation in its turn is embedded into the macro-context of interaction which includes extralinguistic factors of the “world” such as cultural, social, economic political, historical, religious, etc. In linguistics there are many writers on this issue expressing different points of view (see, e. g., Гальперин 1981; Дейк 1989; Halliday 1961; Hoey, 1991, p. 13-14, p. 231) but most of them agree that oral and written texts function in a certain discourse. Most of them also agree that meaning (значення) of language units is a linguistic phenomenon (meaning of words and phrases are recorded in dictionaries and, therefore, belong to the sphere of language), while sense (зміст) is born in a communicative situation as a result of interaction of linguistic and extralinguistic contextual factors mentioned above and belongs to the sphere of speech (see Чернов 1987: 65).

For practical reasons of oral bilingual interpretation we will assume the following working definitions of text and discourse (see Максимов, Радченко 2001: 6-11).

Text is any verbalized (i. e. expressed by means of human language) communicative event performed via (i. e. by means of) human language, no matter whether this communication is performed in written or in oral mode.

It means that we will consider all complete pieces (chunks) of oral verbal communication to be texts.

Discourse is a complex communicative phenomenon which includes, besides the text itself, other factors of interaction (such as shared knowledge, communicative goals, cognitive systems of participants, their cultural competence, etc.), i. e. all that is necessary

for successful production and adequate interpretation (comprehension, understanding and translation) of the text.

Therefore text is embedded into discourse and both of them are “materialized” in a communicative situation which, in its turn, is embedded into the macro context of interaction, i. e. cultural, social, economic, political, historical, religious etc. contexts of the world.

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