@Nancy

Thank you for your comments and insights, Nancy. To meaning being derived form the text and the context, perhaps we can also add history, experience, and perspective.

Thinking more about this, it seems we cannot have objective text without having meaning infused in it. A pause in the interview, for example, would not show up in the transcription if we are being literal, unless, of course, there were some prior decision about how to handle that (none of which appears in most of the research I read, at least). The “meaning” is much more complicated than the words alone lead us at times to believe!

Jefffrey