The second half of the twentieth century was marked by a wave of the so-called “turns” — “linguistic turn”, “narrative turn”, “biographical turn” and “visual turn”, which have led to an obvious shift in research interests and methodological choices in humanities and social sciences. The researchers from various disciplinary fields have admitted that, to understand the logic of different forms of knowledge, we have to examine their “textual” (narrative, storytelling) nature; that any research in the social, political, psychological or cultural sphere turns out to be focused on linguistic issues; that social reality is inherently textual and that all social practices are constituted and structured by discourses and intense struggles of different discourses. Sociology did not stand to the side of such methodological changes: at least for two and a half decades the concepts “narrative” and “narrative analysis”, “discourse” and “discourse analysis”, “text”, “context”, “intertext”, etc. have been extremely popular at the theoretical and empirical levels Nonetheless, we still have not received their precise definitions and they are interpreted quite arbitrarily, being based on the conceptual and methodological preferences of the researcher, as well as the goals and objectives of the particular applied or fundamental research project. The article identifies the key themes of the ongoing and, unfortunately, missing methodological discussions in the field of textual analysis that would be quite useful to clarify at least the criteria for the correct naming of different formats of analytical work with textual data.