Teun Adrianus van Dijk is a Dutch scholar born in 1943 who has contributed significantly to the fields of text linguistics, discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis. He founded six international journals focused on these topics. His work has focused on how racism is reproduced through the language of politicians, journalists, and scholars. His model of context, social cognition, and memory examines how the social context influences discourse through an interface of social cognition and memory that allows semantic representations to take on social meaning.
1. TEUN ADRIANUS VAN
DIJK
Born May 7, 1943, in Naaldwijk,
the Netherlands, he is a scholar in the fields
of text linguistics, discourse
analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).
2. He founded six international journals: Text
& Talk, Discourse & Society, Discourse
Studies, Discourse & Communication and
the internet journal in Spanish Discurso &
Sociedad, of which he still edits the last
four.
3. HIS MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS
• He contributed to the development of the
psychology of text processing. Since the
1980s his work in CDA focused especially
on the study of the discursive reproduction
of racism by what he calls the 'symbolic
elites' (politicians, journalists, scholars,
writers), and the theories of ideology and
context.
4. For the benefit of translation, Van Dijk has a
Model: Context, Social Cognition and Memory.
• Contextual Frame:
“The discourse can not and should not be studied
separately from their various kinds of context. To
understand the different properties 'internal'
speech in semantic and strategic levels, we
cannot ignore the role of the conditions,
functions, effects and circumstances of the
production and comprehension of discourse”
(Van Dijk 1997a: 113)
5. • Social Cognition and Memory: Components of
connective interface between discourse and
context
“The relationship between social structure and
discourse structure is not a direct but indirect,
which passes through a kind of interface called
social cognition” (Van Dijk 2002a)
Cognition, as noted by Van Dijk, allows to keep
semantic representations which provides to take
the most valuable significance of the discourse.
6. Some of the situational parameters or categories:
• Domain
• Global interaction and communicative type.
• Functions
• Intentionality
• Purpose
• Date and time
• Place
• Circumstances
• Brackets and important objects
• Role of participant
• Professional Role
• Social Role
• Social Representations