Iv - University of Salford Institutional Repository

In Europe, the linguistic analysis of texts was first undertaken
in the early sixties. Tools for text-linguistics or discourse analysis
were not available then. Resort had to be made to linguistics which,
however, was not sufficiently able to reconstruct the syntax and
semantics of texts, either. The two vital aspects, ie. the problems of
supra-sentential relations and text interpretation in literature, had a
great impact on the development of textlinguistics.
TEXT AS THE APPROPRIATE UNIT OF TRANSLATION
Before going any further into text-linguistics or discourse
analysis it is advisable, at the very outset, to know what a text is.
For Halliday, "...any instance of living language that is playing some
part in a context of situation is called a text". (Halliday and
Hassan, 1985, p10) Though a stretch of linguistic structures, a text
is basically a semantic unit. Halliday does not distance himself from
the theory of language as an instrument of social interaction among the
members of a speech community. He stresses the importance of langauge
as a living entity aimed primarily at the achievement of communication
among fellow-communicants in a context of situation. He views the text
as being non-extricable, non-alienable from the situational context in
which it is embedded. For the text is a continued stretch of connected
sentences and not an ad hoc accumulation of isolated structures in a
non-situational vacuum. The inter-connectedness which exists along a
stretch of sentences or utterances constituting a text bestows upon it
a unique and distinctive character.
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