Written Discourse Analysis

Abstract

In the relatively recent past, a whole issue ofARAL(Kaplan,et al.1983) was devoted to text analysis. In a way, an article of the sort offered here may be premature in the sense that it appears only two years after the more thorough review volume. There are two reasons why it seems appropriate to look at this area again so quickly. First, the area of text analysis is an extremely active one, and no major bibliographies have appeared since 1983. Second, the approach taken here is somewhat different from that inARAL III; this review has no direct concern either with pedagogical applications or with contrastive forms of text. There is, of necessity, some overlap in bibliography between this article and the earlier volume, but the great majority of sources cited did not appear there. This particular area is in a state of very rapid growth, moving toward the evolution of a new paradigm which may radically modify the field of applied linguistics by providing a new set of questions and a new way of answering them. The rate and direction of change seem to justify another brief sortie into text analysis, and thereby to try to disambiguate some notions that have been available for greater or lesser periods of time.