Historical Perspectives on Text Analysis
It is a major concern of linguists to find out and depict clearly how human beings use language to communicate, and, in particular, how addressers construct linguistic messages for addressees and how addressees work on linguistic messages in order to interpret and understand them.
Accordingly, two main approaches have been developed in linguistics to deal with the transmission and reception of the utterances and messages. The first is "discourse analysis," which mainly focuses on the structure of naturally occurring spoken language, as found in such "discourses" as conversations, commentaries, and speeches. The second approach is "text analysis," which focuses on the structure of written language, as found in such "texts" as essays and articles, notices, book chapters, and so on. It is worth mentioning, however, that the distinction between "discourse" and "text" is not clear-cut. Both "discourse" and "text" can be used in a much broader sense to include all language units with a communicative function, whether spoken or written. Some scholars (see, e.g., Van Dijk, 1983; Grabe and Kaplan, 1989; Freedman, 1989) talk about "spoken and written discourses"; others (see, e.g., Widdowson, 1977; Halliday, 1978; Kress, 1985; Leckie-Tarry, 1993) talk about "spoken and written text." In this paper, we stick to "text analysis" with a focus on the structure of written language at micro- and macro-levels.
According to Connor (1994), text analysis dates back to the Prague School of Linguistics, initiated by Vilem Mathesius in the 1920s. Later on it was elaborated by Jan Firbas and Frantisek Dane in the 1950s and 1960s. Connor (1994) believes that The Prague School's major contribution to text analysis was the notion of theme and rheme, which describes the pattern of information flow in sentences and its relation to text coherence.
On the other hand, Stubbs (1995) states that the notion of text analysis was developed in British linguistics from the 1930s to the 1990s. In this regard, the tradition, as Stubbs (1995) continues, is visible mainly in the work of Firth, Halliday, and Sinclair (See, e.g., Firth 1935, 1957a, 1957b; Halliday 1985, 1992; Sinclair 1987, 1990). The principles underlying these works, as stated by Stubbs, demand studying the use of real language in written and spoken discourse and performing textual analysis of naturally occurring language.
As (Connor 1994: 682) states, "systemic linguistics, a related approach to text analysis and semiotics, emerged in the 1960s with the work of linguists such as Halliday, whose theories emphasize the ideational or content-bearing functions of discourse as well as the choices people make when they use language to structure their interpersonal communications (see, e.g., Halliday, 1978)." Halliday's systemic linguistics has influenced text analysis tremendously as well as curriculum models for language education (see, e.g., Mohan 1986). Following Halliday and Hasan's (1976) taxonomy, the notion of cohesion has been one of the popular issues in text analysis.
According to Connor (1994), in the 1970s and 1980s, many linguists, psychologists, and composition specialists around the world embraced text and discourse analysis. Connor believes that this New School of Text Analysis is characterized by an eclectic, interdisciplinary emphasis, placing psychological and educational theories on an equal status with linguistic theories (whereas the Prague and systemic approaches primarily orient themselves to linguistics). Examples of text analysis from this new approach include studies of macro-level text structures such as Swales's (1990) studies of the organization of introductions in scientific research articles; and Biber's (1988) multidimensional computerized analysis of diverse features in spoken and written texts.
Bloor and Bloor (1995) contend that by the process of analysis, linguists build up descriptions of the language, and gradually discover more about how people use language in social communication. The same thing can be considered with the dynamic process of translation in that the discourse and rhetorical structures encoded in the source language can be reconstructed in the target language, and then the translator goes for the appropriate syntax and lexicon. One of the indexes of a "good" translation would, therefore, be to see to what extent a translator has been able to reconstruct the rhetorical structures of the source text in the target language through text analysis.