HUMAYITY: Jos Journal of General Studies Volume 4 umber 3, April 2008 (pp 203-216) Contemporary Issues in Text Analysis: Assessing Parra’s “Warnings” Jerome Terpase Dooga Department of English, University of Jos doogaj@unijos.edu.ng ; zwakausu@gmail.com ; zwakausu@yahoo.com Abstract This paper explores the contemporary dimensions in text analysis. It draws on mounting evidence from the literature to show that analysis must contextualize and problematize the socio- political issues that gave rise to the texts in order to provide deep insight into the goals and themes of such texts. To achieve this, text analysts have increasingly broadened the scope of what used to be the domain of stylistics to include Discourse Stylistics, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and aspects of Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics. The analysis demonstrated in the paper is such a fusion but excludes such common stylistic features as punctuation, paragraphing, etc. This is not because these no longer matter, but due to space constraints are taken for granted as already demonstrated sufficiently in the literature and therefore ‘known;’ but more important, so as to concentrate on the aspect(s) the paper seeks to highlight. 1 Introduction Until quite recently, stylistic analysis was synonymous with practical rhetoric and literary criticism. It consisted chiefly in commenting on the quality of the text in terms of its literary attributes and devices, and sometimes involved also a close reading to infer sociological or political undertones with wider application. A contemporary approach to stylistics is a fusion of literary, linguistic and discourse analysis of texts, and this approach is applicable to everything that can be termed ‘text.’ 2 Theoretical Antecedents An uncontroversial but unhelpful definition of stylistics is that “stylistics is the study of style.” (Lyons 1977b:613) The term style may be used in a variety of senses. It may be used to refer to the kind of systematic variation in texts that is covered by such terms as ‘formal,’ ‘colloquial,’ ‘pedantic,’ etc.; and this sense of ‘style’ gives rise to one very broad definition of stylistics. According to Crystal and Davy (1969:90) Stylistics is “the description of the linguistic characteristics of all situationally restricted uses of language.” Under this interpretation, the term stylistics will merge with what others may wish to call sociolinguistics or pragmatics; but it will