Text, Context and Discourse

Oral communication, in the same way as written, always takes place in a certain context or communicative situation. This situation in its turn is embedded in the macro–context of communication, which includes extra–linguistic factors of the “world” such as cultural, social, economic, political, historical, religious, etc. In linguistics there are many scholars expressing different points of view, however most of them agree that oral and written texts function in a certain discourse. Most of them also agree that meaning of language units is a purely linguistic phenomenon (meanings of words and phrases are registered in dictionaries and, therefore, belong to the sphere of language), while sense is generated in a communicative situation as a result of interaction of linguistic and extra–linguistic contextual factors mentioned above and belongs to the sphere of speech.

For practical reasons of oral bilingual interpretation we will assume working definitions of text and discourse as they are given below.

Text is any verbalized (i.e. expressed by means of human language) communicative event performed via human language, no matter whether this communication is performed in written or in oral mode.

It means that we will consider all complete units of oral verbal communication to be texts.

Discourse is a complex communicative phenomenon, which includes, besides the text itself, other factors of interaction (such as shared knowledge, communicative goals, cognitive systems of participants, their cultural competence, etc), i.e. all that is necessary for successful production and adequate interpretation (comprehension and translating/interpreting) of the text.

Therefore text is embedded in discourse and both of them are “materialised” in a communicative situation, which, in its turn, is embedded in the macro context of interaction, i.e. cultural, social, economic political, historical, religious and other contexts of the world.