Abstract:
This paper seeks to bridge between “hermeneutics” as the theory and practice of
interpreting texts, and “discourse analysis” as the study of the mechanism of
how senses (context-oriented meanings) are formed in different contexts. To do
this, reviewing hermeneutics and discourse concepts, it will focus upon the main
constituents of any instance of interpretation, and through some examples, it
will show how each constituent as a meaningful element of certain discourse may
influence interpretation.
Machine summary:
"While the former (1962: 35) emphasizes the autonomy of text, and suggests that we should suppose that it has something to say which we know nothing beforehand, and its meaning is independent of our understandings, the latter recognizes two distinct aspects of interpretation: the intention of the author, which is the ‘Bedeutung’ (meaning); and contemporary understandings in different contexts, which is ‘sense’ (Sinn).
However, as Sasani (2003, 2004) puts it, it is possible to introduce all influential features of each discourse in the form of four main parameters: 1) the text itself in any form, including linguistic texts, media, artworks, and more recently virtual, electronic, digital texts; 2) the producer as the speaker, writer, author or artist - absent or present; 3) the interpreter/understander as a reader, viewer, listener, etc; 4) and last but not least, the spatiotemporal context of, or context of situation as Malinowsky (1935) calls it, or ‘chronotope’ to borrow Bakhtin’s term (1938/1981), or ‘maqâm’ to use a Muslim concept.
In a religious text such as the Qu’ran, interpreters try to understand the intention of the original author, here God. Their method, however, is different from that of participants in a conversation: exegetes try to re-construct the original context (sha΄n-e nozul or ’asbâ-e nozu’), resort to an Imam’s interpretations and other legitimate interpreters’, and to analyze the text (verses of the Qu’ran) by means of lexicology, etymology, morphology, syntax, semantics, rhetoric, etc."