再论Text与Discourse的异同

Revisiting the Similarities and Dissimilarities between Text and Discourse

长期以来,text和discourse是语言学中容易混淆的两个概念。本文对这两个术语从定义、关系、使用和汉译等四个方面进行梳理和探讨,指出两者在意义上有重叠,都可以作为语法单位、语义单位、言语行为和多模态符号,且用法也相同;不同的是,discourse还可以表示更高层次的意义——社会实践,而text则不行。Discourse比text的意义更加宽泛,这与它们的字典释义是一致的。Text和discourse之间存在着以同义和产品—过程关系为主导的各种关系。对它们的汉译要以两者所表达的具体概念为基础,以不产生意义冲突为标准。

For a long time, text and discourse, as two linguistic terminologies, have been a source of persisting confusion for people. This paper explores the two terms in view of their definition, relationship, usage and Chinese translation so as to find their similarities and dissimilarities. The result shows that they overlap a lot. They can be used interchangeably when both serving as grammatical unit, semantic unit, speech act and multimodal sign. While discourse is used as social practice, it is beyond what text can mean. The fact that discourse has broader meaning than text is consistent with what they mean in dictionary. Lots of relationships, mostly based on that of synonymy and product-process, are ascribed to them. Their Chinese translation should be done on the basis of their specific meaning so as to avoid conflict of meaning as the principle.