analysis (微观对比分析). In this and the next chapters we are going to study
macro-contrastive analysis (宏观对比分析), which is conducted on the textual
and pragmatic levels of language.
The traditional concern of linguistics has been the abstract formal system of the
language (called“langue” [语言系统],
“Competence (语言能力)” or “code (语
码)” respectively by linguists of different persuasions). Linguists claim that to gain
access to the code“underlying” a language, it is necessary to disregard much that
goes into language. This purging of aspects which are seen either as irrelevant or as
complicating factors has been called by Lyons (1970) the“idealization of data.
”
One of the ways through which data can be idealized is decontextualization (去语
境化). A sentence can be decontextualized in two ways, either by being removed
from the company of the sentences that precede or follow it in a text, i.e. its verbal
context (文本语境), or by being separated off from the real-world situation in
which it is used, i.e. its physical or situational context (情景语境).
In the past few decades, however, an increasing interest arose for analyzing the
way sentences work in sequence to produce coherent stretches of language.
In fact the search for larger linguistic units and structures has been pursued by
scholars from many disciplines. Linguists investigate the features of language that
bind sentences together when they are used in sequence. Ethnographers (scienti c
researchers of different races of people) and sociologists study the structure of
social interaction, especially as manifested in the way people enter into dialogue.
Anthropologists analyze the structure of myths and folk-tales. Psychologists carry
out experiments on the mental processes underlying comprehension. And further
contributions have come from those concerned with arti cial intelligence, rhetoric,
philosophy, and style.
These approaches have a common concern: they stress the need to see language
as a dynamic, social, interactive phenomenon—whether between speaker and lis-
tener, or between writer and reader. It is argued that meaning is conveyed not by
single sentences but by more complex exchanges, in which the participants’ beliefs
 Peking University Press and Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
P. Ke, Contrastive Linguistics, Peking University Linguistics Research 1,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1385-1_6
133
and expectations, the knowledge they share about each other and about the world,
and the situation in which they interact, play a crucial part (Crystal, 1987, p. 116).
It was against this intellectual background that macrolinguistics emerged and
developed. Sometimes known as“broad” or “human” linguistics, macrolin-
guistics (宏观语言学) takes as its goal the attainment of a scienti c understanding
of how people use language to communicate with each other or, in Coulthard’s
terms, of“situated speech.
” (Coulthard, 1977, p. 3) Comparing this with the goal
of code linguistics, which is to specify the universal and particular properties of
human languages, we may notice that with macrolinguistics the attention has been
shifted from code (语码) to process: the process of communication. In antithesis to
(or complementary to) Noam Chomsky’s Competence (语言能力), Hymes (1972)
proposes that a speaker’s communicative competence should be the object of
linguistic enquiry.
This raises the whole question of how people communicate. Obviously they do
so predominantly by means of language, though, to a lesser degree, other signaling
devices such as gestures, facial expressions, and other similar paralinguistic devices
(“body language”) also play a part. Since people communicate through language,
code linguistics has a major say in any account of the process of verbal commu-
nication. Nevertheless, it is not language itself that carries out verbal communi-
cation. Knowledge of the code (语码) is a necessary condition for verbal
communication since all forms of communication involves the use of some code,
but it is not a suf cient condition. There are other factors—non-codal, human
factors—which affect the success or failure of communication. It is the concern of
macrolinguistics to inquire what else is required for successful communication in
addition to knowledge of the code (Competence [语言能力]). Sometimes we use
one word—sensitivity—to embrace all these non-codal aspects, but macrolinguis-
tics sets out to investigate and explicitly specify the situational constraints to which
speech-events are subject to and the socio-cultural variables which the communi-
cating individual must be able to identify in order to produce appropriate utterances
in a communicative event.
To sum up, the following three points characterize macrolinguistics (宏观语言
学):
(1) focusing on communicative competence rather than“linguistic” competence (in
Chomsky’s sense of the term)
(2) attempting to describe linguistic events within their extralinguistic settings
(3) searching for units of linguistic organization larger than the single sentence
(Based on James, 1980, pp. 100–102)
134 6 Textual Contrastive Analysis
6.1 Text and Discourse
A text is a piece of structured spoken or written language. It may be of considerable
length, e.g. a webpage,, a fairy tale, a sermon, a novel, etc.; or it may consist of only
one word, e.g.“DANGER” as a warning sign outside a power substation. One
important feature of a text is that a full understanding of it is often impossible
without reference to the context in which it occurs (Fig. 6.1).
Discourse (话语) is a general term for instances of language use, i.e. language
produced as the result of an act of communication.
According to Van Dijk (1980, p. 29), the difference between text and discourse
(话语) lies in that the former is a theoretical conception related to a language user’s
Competence (语言能力) while the latter is a notion realistically perceived in
relation to the user’s Performance.
We may consider a text from the point of view of its structure or functions (e.g.
warning, instructing, carrying out a transaction, etc.), or both.
On the structural or formal level, the study of the text addresses the question of
how sentences are organized into larger, suprasentential units or texts: this is the
eld of text analysis (文本分析). On the functional level, the study of the text
concentrates on the ways in which people put language to use: this is the eld of
discourse analysis (话语分析) (Coulthard, 1977).
The terms“text analysis (语篇分析)” and“discourse analysis (话语分析)”
have sometimes been used in a confused way. There seem to be three approaches to
the use of these two terms:
(1) Some scholars have suggested that text analysis refers to the European tra-
ditions and discourse analysis (话语分析) to Anglo-American traditions for
doing the same thing.
(2) Others tend to see the two terms as complementary, believing that“text
analysis (语篇分析)” starts with linguistic forms and works outwards to
investigate in which contexts they are appropriate, whereas discourse anal-
ysis (话语分析) starts with the communicative situations and works
inwards to nd the formal linguistic correlates to the situational variables.
(3) Still others use the term“text analysis (语篇分析)” to refer to the study of
written discourse (话语) and the term“discourse analysis (话语分析)” to talk
about the study of spoken discourse.