ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5, I claimed that formal features of texts have experiential, relational, expressive or connective value, or some combination of these, and I connected the first three with the three aspects of social practice which (according to Ch. 3) may be constrained by power (contents, relations, and subjects) and their associated structural effects (on knowledge and beliefs, social relationships, and social identities). It is evident, however, that one cannot directly extrapolate from the formal features of a text to these structural effects upon the constitution of a society! The relationship between text and social structures is an indirect, mediated one. It is mediated first of all by the discourse which the text is a part of, because the values of textual features only become real, socially operative, if they are embedded in social interaction, where texts are produced and interpreted against a background of common-sense assumptions (part of MR) which give textual features their values. These discourse processes, and their dependence on background assumptions, are the concern of the second stage of the procedure, interpretation.
