Text, discourse, context: A meta-trilogy for discourse analysis

Abstract

The majority of functional models of language, which purport to account for text, do not recognize the distinct dimension corresponding to “discourse”, as conceived here. Instead, the various semantic-pragmatic aspects of the use of indexical expressions, in particular, tend to be conceived uniquely in terms of the textual environment of the markers involved. Correlatively, the invocation of “context” in such approaches tends to be limited essentially to the co-text. But according to the present study, such expressions operate in terms of the mental discourse representations which the participants are jointly as well as severally constructing as the discourse proceeds.The article's aim is to show that the discourse dimension of language use is crucial to the ways in which indexical markers function, and hence should be taken into account in their modelling. This can only be done, it is argued, by integrating their treatment within a model of the broader utterance context in which such expressions are used, thus permitting a dialectic between the system-derived properties of such expressions and those emanating from the particular uses of such resources in actual communication.