Halliday’s Approach to Text Analysis

There is a great number of different approaches to text analysis. The theory of enterpretation of texts existed already in Ancient Greece. Antient people tried to explain texts from the Bible, they criticized them. They criticized these texts from the philosophical point of view. The earlier methods of the Bible interpretation were the following.
“First, talmudical hermeneutics which refers to the rules and methods for the investigation and exact determination of the meaning of the Scriptures or religious writings” (Court, 2003:11). The methods that were used in Talmudical hermeneutics for explaining the meaning of the scripture were different, for example the interpretation of certain words and suffixes and prefixes in general. Grammar was the main subject of exploration in talmudical interpretation.
The second method was typological or symbolic hermeneutics that interpreted events and characters. People had to analyse what events were happening and what actions were doing defferent persons. Typological approach tried to describe events not with correspondences in historical, or cultural details, “but holding the original meaning of the text (Court, 2003:35). Typology was the prevalent and characteristic method of interpretation for the New Testament use of the Old Testament (ibid.).
In antient times there also existed a historical interpretation of text. “Historical interpretation refers to understanding the culture, background, and situation which prompted the text. The interpreter must determine the historical context (Dyck; Fee, 1996:15), that is, the historical setting of a given text.” It is also important to mention an allegorical interpretation of text. “Allegorical approach assumes that the text has a meaning other than what the literal wording says (ibid.).” This also very antient approach tried to explain one thing referring at the same time to another. That is why we can say that allegorical approach examined very deep hidden and symbolic things.
In the 20th century when German Romanticism changed hermeneutics at all, grammar and logical combinations became a must for interpretation (ibid.).…