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Hatim's arbitrary distinction between text and discourse is
functionally unjustifiable. This distinction may be attributed to
unintended inaccuracy in the use of terminology, for discourse cannot
be said to incorporate a number of texts. Discourse, in brief, is
text in action, ie. communication.
Halliday, (1985, pp11-12) and de Beaugrande (1980, pp199) define
texts as communicative occurrences" which project the totality of
meaning permeating the text's macro-context through the active
interplay of micro-contextual structures, ie. the individual
constituent elements of the text. They also agree that communication
occurs between an addresser and an addressee, a sender and a receiver
according to cognitive, linguistic and extralinguistic strategies.
But the sender's text, whether written or spoken, finally materializes
in the form of a surface or audible structure which the receiver,
whether reader or hearer, picks up and tries to grasp its meaning or
meanings. Unless both sender and receiver realize how the surface
structure of the text in internally built, it will be extremely
difficult to reciprocate the message and, subsequently, grasp its
meaning in either literary or non-literary texts. A distinction is to
be maclebetween the layers of meaning which operate and interact within
the text constituting, in the end, the text's totality of meaning.
Inspired by an article published by Y N Award in Al-
Nadwah, a Saudi Arabian daily, on 'Shifts of Meaning in Translation',
I took up the notion and elaborated it in what I have termed the
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