Linguistic Interpretations of The Concept of Discourse: Differences from Text, Speech, And Communication

Abstract

This article clarifies how the notion of discourse is interpreted in linguistics and how it differs from the related concepts of text, speech, and communication. Although these terms are sometimes used interchangeably in everyday academic practice, they refer to distinct levels of language organization and analysis. The study adopts a conceptual-analytical design and synthesizes major linguistic traditions that have shaped discourse studies, including text linguistics, pragmatics, conversation analysis, functional linguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. The results show that “text” primarily denotes a structured linguistic product, “speech” foregrounds an event of language use by a speaker, and “communication” describes a broader social process that includes multimodal and institutional factors. “Discourse,” by contrast, functions as an integrative category: it treats language as socially situated meaning-making, linking textual form and speech activity to context, ideology, power, and interactional goals. The discussion argues that discourse is best understood as a dynamic configuration of linguistic choices and social constraints, where meaning arises not only from grammar and cohesion but also from participants’ roles, presuppositions, genre conventions, and interpretive frames. The article concludes by proposing an operational distinction useful for linguistic research: text is an analyzable artifact, speech is an enacted performance, communication is an interactional system, and discourse is the contextualized semiotic practice that connects all three.