There is considerable variation in the use of the term discourse analysis, so I
had better insert a brief note on what I mean by it. First, I do not intend to
draw any important distinction between text and discourse. As these terms
are normally used, they often imply only a difference in emphasis, but
nothing of theoretical importance need hang on the distinction. A distinction
is sometimes implied between written text and spoken discourse.
Alternatively, discourse refers to interactive language versus text as noninteractive
monologue, whether spoken or written. For example, one can
talk of the text of a speech. Another distinction is that discourse implies
length whereas a text may be very short. Halliday and Hasan (1976) define a
text as a semantic unit and point out that complete texts include Exit and No
smoking. Some scholars have used the two terms to label theoretically
important distinctions, but since I will not be concerned with those distinctions
here, I will ignore them.