Linguistics of text and discourse analysis: origins and development

The 20th century witnessed decisive transformations, in ways of viewing and addressing the linguistic phenomenon, not independent of the accumulated developments in philosophy and the material sciences. Perhaps the horizons opened before methodologies of treatment and the related theoretical issues of language acquisition and description were a remarkable achievement... among the accomplishments that revolutionized the conception of language and its related production. Soon, this "contagion" of transformations spread to a field that was almost independent, or so it was perceived, namely the text. This field was almost "privatized" by literary theories and criticism due to the nature of the production, which is considered the testing ground or specialty of their work. However, confidence in the settled and long-standing opinions in this domain was affected by the influence of what had been achieved in the field of foundational approaches in linguistics. As a result, two terms emerged that dominated discussions, questions, and approaches: "discourse" and "text." Their dedicated consideration and treatment led to genuine questions that are closer to challenges than to luxury thinking or mental exercises. Moreover, focusing on them led to questioning the effectiveness of modern linguistics, based on the fact that communication does not rely on words and sentences but on texts and discourses. Given what the nature of thinking about phenomena and contemplating them in the modern era has come to entail, in addition to the constraints of knowledge production, it became "necessary" to form a team dedicated to studying the unit that was chosen as the subject of research, analysis, and description. The University of Constance in Germany was at the forefront of this approach; however, the diversity of the research unit and its variation in the type of production from which its traditions and identity are derived, on the one hand, and its resistance to purely linguistic analysis—limiting meaning—on the other hand, hastened the dispersal of the team, each forging its own path and choosing its own direction for research and scrutiny.