Revisiting the Similarities and Dissimilarities between Text and Discourse

For a long time, text and discourse, as two linguistic terminologies, have been a source of persisting confusion for people.This paper explores the two terms in view of their definition, relationship, usage and Chinese translation so as to find their similarities and dissimilarities.The result shows that they overlap a lot.They can be used interchangeably when both serving as grammatical unit, semantic unit, speech act and multimodal sign.While discourse is used as social practice, it is beyond what text can mean.The fact that discourse has broader meaning than text is consistent with what they mean in dictionary.Lots of relationships, mostly based on that of synonymy and product-process, are ascribed to them.Their Chinese translation should be done on the basis of their specific meaning so as to avoid conflict of meaning as the principle.