Language/Discourse: Textual Analysis, Computer and Statistics

Abstract: Textual linguistics has been undergoing a continuous redefining of its internal and external boundaries after Halliday & Hasan’s inaugural thesis. It notably concerns the concepts of text and discourse, and has led to the constitution of a new research field: Textual Discourse Analysis (TDA). We will start from two questions which were asked at the origin of this Congress: “What is a text – or the text – in the digital age?” and “Which new methods are available for textual analysis?” We assume that text is neither merely nor principally a linguistic object, but is at the meeting point of various fields and key-concepts: sentence, utterance, document, archive, basis and corpuses, discourse. Answers must be searched in digital philology as well as in the hermeneutic aspects of discourse analysis.