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Post-war linguists shifted their focus from the study of deep and
surface structures to the study of natural languages. Instead of
operating on a finite corpus of sentences, post-war structuralists
focused on natural languages which have infinite sets of sentences.
The goa10 of linguistics was, consequently, red-defined to analyse the
native speaker's competence in understanding the language.
Understanding a text and the communication process which emerges
therefrom depend •on how the text is read. Therefore, text
interpretation relies largely on text manipulation.
In an article on 'Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading' (in 'The
Reader in the Text' (ed.) Susan R Suleiman and Inge Crossman, 1980,
pp46-66), Jonathan Culler regards the study of reading as "... a way
of investigating how works have the meaning they do, and it leaves
entirely open the question of what kinds of meanings works have". The
analyzability of meaning into various substructures aims at
identifying meaning and not breaking up its intellectual and stylistic
make-up.
The text-reader relationship has been placed in a wider
perspective. Hermenueticists advocate that a dialogue should be
established between the reader and the text in which the reader
manipulates the initial resources of the text to recreate, rather than
translate, it anew. The reader will cease to act as an intermediary
between the source author and the receptor readership. He will assume
that authoritarian authorship of the created text not as a re-
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