Van Dijk

Toward a model of Strategic Discourse Processing

The study of discourse
Historical Background
Several disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences have recently shown as increasing
interest in the study of discourse. Over 2000 years ago, classical poetics and rhetorics already
provided structural models for texts, such as poetry, drama, and legal or political discourse. The
conceptual sophistication of classical rhetorics remained unmatched until the development of
structuralism in linguistics, poetics, and anthropology in the late 1960s, after the earlier example
of the so-called Russian Formalists and the Czech Structuralists between the world wars.
Textlinguistics
Until the 1970s modern linguistics in America rarely looked beyond the sentence boundary. The
prevailing generative transformational paradigm focused on phonological, morphological,
syntactic, and later also semantic, structures of isolated, context and text- intedependent
sentences, ignoring the early discourse analysis carried out by Harris. Interest in the linguistic
study of discourse was restricted to less prominent linguistic schools, such as tagmemics, which
developed discourse analytic methods mainly for descriptive field work on indigenous languages.
European linguistics, especially in England and Germany had remained somewhat closer to the
structuralist tradition.
Initially, the more theoretical claims and proposals based on the assumption that a grammar
should also account for the systematic linguistic structures of the whole texts, thereby becoming
a text grammar, remained in a programmatic stage, still too close to the generative paradigm for
comfort.
The Social Sciencies and Discourse Analysis
The study of discourse became relevant in particular as soon as it was recognized, also around
1970, that language studies should not be restricted to the grammatical analysis of abstract or
ideal language systems, but, rather, that actual language use in the social context should be the
empirical object of linguistic theories. Thus, sociolinguistics not only became interested in the
study of social variation of language use, but also paid increasing attention to various forms of
language use, such as verbal dueling and storytelling.
Psychology and Artificial Intelligence

Following the prevailing generative transformational trend, psychology and psycholinguistics

were hesitant to recognize the relevance of discourse to the study of language processing. Early
psycholinguistic models in the 1960s were restricted to the syntax and later, the semantics of
isolated sentences.
Again, the early 1970s brought a breach in this paradigm. The growing interest in semantic
memory resulted in the use of discourse materials and the first steps toward a cognitive model of
discourse understanding. At the same time, educational psychology realized that learning often
takes place on the basis of texts, which also contributed to the quickly developing interest in
memory for discourse. This revival took place in artificial intelligence as well. In this area, the
year 1972 brought a decisive paradigm shift. The computer-simulated understanding of language
required the development of programs for the automatic processing of texts.
In our initial work on cognitive models for discourse comprehension we attempted to integrate
several proposals from these earlier approaches to discourse, in particular from our own work in
these areas.
Whereas our earlier model could still be characterized as predominantly structural, we now
propose a more dynamic, process-oriented, on-line model, an approach we want to call
strategical.
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
Cognitive Assumptions

Comparison between a traffic accident being seen by a person and the retelling about the
story of the accident.
In both cases there is a representation in memoryCONSTRUCTIVIST assumption of
our model.
Construction of meaning.INTERPRETATIVE ASSUMPTION
Persons who understand real events or speech events are able to construct a mental
representation, and especially a meaningful representation, only if they have more general
knowledge about such events. In order to interpret as an accident, they must know sth about the
usual traffic events and actions in which cars and drivers are involved. Similarly, the two person
may interpret the events in the light of previous experiences with similar events, experiences
that may have led to the more general knowledge about them.
We will assume that understanding involves not only the processing and interpretation of
external data, but also the activation and use of internal, cognitive, information.
.PRESUPPOSITIONAL assumption.