Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-hn9fh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-31T11:07:52.402Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Conclusions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Teun A. van Dijk
Affiliation:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Get access

Summary

Although it is generally recognized that context plays a fundamental role in the production, properties and comprehension of discourse, theories and analyses of context have been scarce. Contexts tend to be conceptualized intuitively in terms of properties of communicative situations, such as the gender, age, class or ethnicity of the speakers. Moreover, where the influence of context is being studied, for instance, in sociolinguistics, anthropology and Critical Discourse Analysis, it is generally assumed that these properties of social situations have a direct impact on the structures of text and talk.

In this book a more explicit and empirically more satisfactory theory has been presented that defines contexts in terms of subjective mental models – context models, of participants. Such a theory avoids the determinism of direct social influences or causation, accounts for differences among speakers, and hence accounts for the uniqueness of all discourse and discourse comprehension, even in the "same" social situation, offering a much more sophisticated analysis of the complex structures of contextual influence on text and talk.

This study shows first that most researchers in the humanities and social sciences after World War II engaged in structuralist, formalist and autonomous theories focusing on text, talk, signs, literature or art itself, thereby largely ignoring the social and cultural environments of language and discourse.

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Discourse and Context
A Sociocognitive Approach
, pp. 217 - 225
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Conclusions
  • Teun A. van Dijk, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
  • Book: Discourse and Context
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511481499.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Conclusions
  • Teun A. van Dijk, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
  • Book: Discourse and Context
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511481499.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusions
  • Teun A. van Dijk, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
  • Book: Discourse and Context
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511481499.006
Available formats
×