From Text Grammar to

Critical Discourse Analysis

A brief academic autobiography
Version 2.0. August 2004

Teun A. van Dijk

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

In this brief academic autobiography I sketch some of the

developments of my work from text grammar in the early 1970s, to my
present studies in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and other areas of
investigation, such as the study of ideology, knowledge and context. The
focus of this autobiography is on academic. There are very few personal
events mentioned in this text, some of which may explain some of the
changes in my academic interests, such as my growing interest in racist and
critical issues as from the 1980s. However, such a more personal story need to
be told elsewhere.

Text Grammar
To understand my interest in text grammars it should be recalled that
my first academic love was literary theory. After a first degree in French
Language and Literature, with special interest in Surrealist poetry, at the
(protestant) Free University of Amsterdam, I also studied Literary Theory, at
the (City) University of Amsterdam. In that study I especially focused on
literary language, and wanted to know whether literature could be
characterized specifically by its typical use of language.
Under the influence of Chomskys Transformational-Generative
Grammar, such a question at the end of the 1960s was phrased in terms of a
special set of rules that would generate (that is, structurally describe) literary
texts. However, TG-Grammar never was developed to account for text
structures, and thus my aim to develop a generative poetics, reflected in my
first book publications in Dutch (Van Dijk, 1971a, 1971b some of which
was later translated into German and Italian; see the References below for
details), was soon replaced by the more important aim to focus on a
generative text grammar. This would become the topic of my PhD
dissertation (Van Dijk, 1972).
The point of such text grammars was to be able to provide an explicit
description of the (grammatical) structures of texts. The most obvious task of
such a description was to account for (semantic) coherence relations between
sentences, among other fundamental aspects of discourse. Although also
sentence grammars need to make explicit how clauses of complex sentences
are semantically related, there was no serious research then that could be
extended to a linear (sequential) semantics of discourse.
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Under the influence of French structural semantics (Greimas), I

therefore first assumed that meaning relations between sentences had to be
defined in terms of the identity of the lexemes or semes of the words in
such sentences. This assumption later turned out to be totally misguided,
although it remained popular in French structural semantics for years.
The point is that it is not only meaning relations between sentences that
define coherence, but rather referential relations, that is, relations between the
things the sentences in a text denote, as we shall see below.
New and interesting in this emerging theory of text grammar was the
introduction of macrostructures, a notion unknown in any form of sentence
grammar. The point of macrostructures is that texts not only have local or
microstructural relations between subsequent sentences, but that they also
have overall structures that define their global coherence and organization. In
my early work, such macrostructures were of two different kinds, viz., global
structures of meaning, and global structures of form. To avoid confusiuon
between these different kind of global structures, I later introduced the
notion of superstructure to refer to the latter structures, that is, the abstract,
schematic structures that organize the overall form or format of the text, as we
know them from the theory of narrative or the theory of argumentation (Van
Dijk, 1980).
One should ask after more than 30 years whether these text grammars
were wrong or right. As I see it now, I would say that the basic principles of
text grammar are still sound today, as is obvious from the large body of work
still being done in many types of sometimes highly sophisticated discourse
grammars. Indeed, in the same way as a sentence grammar explains why
arbitrary sequences of words do not define sentences, a text grammar needs to
account for the fact that arbitrary sequences of sentences do not define a text.
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However, the way we actually did text grammar then was still very primitive,
and largely speculative, imprecise, and partly misguided. What remained
though was the importance of the notion of coherence in any semantic theory
of discourse, and the obvious idea that texts also are organized at more global,
overall levels of description.
Later studies, also in psychology, about such local (intersentential) and
global (textual) coherence proved to be more sophisticated. Thus, in my book
Text and Context (Van Dijk, 1977), I emphasized that local coherence
between sentences should be based on referential relations between facts in a
possible world, thereby using the then popular notion of possible world
from formal semantics and philosophy. That is, two subsequent propositions
P1 and P2 are coherent if they denote two facts F1 and F2 that are (for
instance conditionally, or causally) related in some possible world, or in some
model representing a situation of such a possible world. Until today, this is
the standard (formal) semantic definition of discourse coherence although
pragmatic and cognitive parameters need to be added to this kind of
definition: discourses are obviously not coherent in the abstract, but coherentfor-discourse-participants-in-some-communicative-situation. In my later work
with Walter Kintsch on the psychology of text processing, this referential
relation was not defined in terms of facts in some possible world, but in
terms of mental models (see below).
Another dimension of local coherence however showed up. Sentences
(or their meanings: propositions) not only cohere because of the relations
between the facts they denote, but also because of relations between their
meanings themselves. In other terms: Coherence not only was extensional,
but also intensional. However, this meaning relation was not defined in
terms of the meanings of isolated words (as in structuralist semantics) but in

terms of the relations between whole propositions. For instance, two

propositions P1 and P2 are intensionally coherent if P2 is a Generalization, a
Specification, an Explanation or an Example of P1. That is, these notions
define a functional relation between subsequent propositions: P2 has the
function of being a Generalization of P1, etc. Later work in Mann &
Thompsons Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) further develops this type of
functional relations between the sentences of texts. Unfortunately they
sometimes confuse them with the referential relations between propositions,
that is, the relations based on the (temporal, conditional, causal, etc.) relations
between the facts denoted by propositions. It is very important to distinguish
these two kinds of coherence, that is, functional (intensional, meaning-based)
coherence, on the one hand, and referential (extensional, reference-based)
coherence, on the other hand.
At the same time, the notion of macrostructure was now specifically
defined in terms of rather precise semantic rules for the derivation of
macropropositions from sequences of micropropositions. In this way, we have
a formal account of the familiar phenomenon of summarizing a text. In the
psychology of text processing, these macrostructures later played a
fundamental role in accounting for the way language users understand, store
and recall texts.
It is therefore strange that even today there are discourse grammars that
only operate at the linear level of subsequent sentences or propositions, and
ignore the crucial global structures (macrostructures, superstructures) that
define the overall meaning and form of texts.
One major reason for this ignorance is probably the fact that
macrostructures are still strange objects in grammatical theory, structures that
need a different account from the structures of the meaning of sentences or
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relations between sentences. Indeed, one can hardly imagine an account of,
for instance, narrative, argumentative or conversational structures on the basis
of grammar alone. In this sense, mainstream modern linguistics itself never
developed a proper discourse-based theory of language use, because its
grammars remained essentially sentence or sequence grammars. The same is
true for much psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. This is also one of the
reasons why discourse analysis became a separate cross-discipline, instead of
a specialization of linguistics. This development also shows how findings in
one (sub) discipline may take decades before they are introduced and
accepted in other (sub) disciplines, or even not introduced at all because they
are found to be Fremdkrper in a discipline.

The psychology of text processing

Precisely because my linguistic colleagues, even in text grammar, did
not feel very comfortable with strange notions such as macrostructures, I
turned to psychology for inspiration and support, and thus encountered Walter
Kintsch. This American psychologist of Austrian descent, had written a book
in 1974 (The Representation of Meaning in Memory) that for the first time in
psychology explicitly stated that the object of study for a cognitive
psychology of understanding no longer should be isolated sentences, but
whole texts. He thereby referred to my 1972 doctoral dissertation on text
grammar. We soon took up contact, and for more than 10 years -- and while I
was writing my Text and Context (Van Dijk, 1977) book, and various articles
on the pragmatics of discourse (Van Dijk, 1981), as well as various books in
Dutch (Van Dijk, 1977, 1978, a, b) -- we thus worked together on several
articles, and finally produced a book Strategies of discourse comprehension

that would have a tremendous influence in the psychology of discourse (Van

Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).
Many of the original ideas on text grammar, including the elusive
macrostructures, found their way in the cognitive theory of text
comprehension. However, whereas in the beginning the mental processes and
representations involved in processing were still too close to the structures
and rules of text grammars, Kintsch and I later discovered that actual
language use is much more flexible and at the same time more fallible: People
make mistakes when talking or when listening to discourse.
Thus, the important notion of strategic understanding was introduced,
which tried to account more realistically for what language users actually do
when they speak or understand discourse. For instance, a grammar assigns a
structure to a sentence or sequences of sentences that is already (abstractly)
given, but real language users already start with the (tentative) interpretation
of the first words a sentence before it has been fully heard or read. That is,
understanding is on line or linear and not post hoc. Such strategic
understanding is very fast and effective, but it is hypothetical: mistakes may
be repaired later.
Also unlike grammars, language users may use information from both
text and context at the same time, or operate at several text levels (phonology,
syntax, semantics, pragmatics) at the same time in order to interpret the text.
In sum, actual text processing is very different from formal, structural text
analysis.
The same is true in discourse production: Language users already may
start to speak or write without a fully developed structure of sentences,
paragraphs, turns or whole discourses in mind.

Language users represent sentences and their meanings in memory.

That is, a psychological theory is a theory of mental processing, and needs to
take into account that for instance our working memory, that is, Short Term
Memory (STM) has limited capacity, and needs to be emptied regularly, after
which its interpreted information is stored in Long Term Memory (LTM).
Thus, for all levels of discourse, Kintsch and I described the strategies
involved in their analysis, interpretation and storage in memory. Instead of
conditions or rules for local coherence or the derivation of macrostructures,
we now had effective strategies for their manipulation in the minds of the
language users.
The result of such a process of understanding is a Text Representation
in Episodic Memory, that is, the part of LTM where peoples personal
experiences are stored. The notion of macrostructure plays a fundamental role
in this process and representation: It is a structure construed by the language
user in order to organize a text representation in memory. In other words,
macrostructures in a psychological theory are subjective: They explain how
language users understand what is most important in a text, that is, what its
topics are, and how language users are able to summarize discourse.
Another crucial element, lacking in text grammar, needed to be
introduced, viz., knowledge. In order to understand a text, vast amounts of
social-cultural world knowledge needs to be presupposed. It is impossible to
define coherence relations between sentences, or indeed to construct
macrostructures, without such knowledge. About the same time (in 1977),
Schank and Abelson published their famous book about scripts, taken as the
abstract ways people organize their knowledge about stereotypical events
such as shopping or eating in a restaurant. In other words, in order to
understand a text, language users activate one or more scripts, and use the

relevant information in the construction of a Text Representation in Episodic

Memory.

Models

Kintsch and I introduced another crucial notion, viz., that of a

(situation) model, a notion that was also used, though in a different way, by
the psycholinguist Johnson-Laird in his books Mental Models (1983). The
point of that notion is that language users do not merely construct a
(semantic) representation of the text in their episodic memory, but also a
representation of the event or situation the text is about. This notion of model
proved to be very successful. It explained many things that hitherto were
obscure or ignored:
First of all, it beautifully grounded the theory of referential
coherence: Sentences (or their propositions) were simply defined to be
coherent relative to a model. That is, if people are able to construe a possible
or plausible model for a sequence or a whole text, then the text is subjectively
coherent. This also resolves the problem of extralinguistic reference in
linguistics and discourse analysis: It is not so much the real world people are
referring to or talking about, but the (inter)subjective (re)construction of the
world, or a situation in the world, in terms of their mental models. That is, we
thus have a cognitive and subjective, and hence more realistic, basis for the
notion of referential coherence that was earlier defined more abstractly in
terms of formal models or possible worlds.
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Secondly, macrostructures of texts can be explained in terms of the

higher level macrostructures of models: They may not be directly visible or
expressed in the discourse itself, but the fact that people know what its
general topics are is represented in their mental model of an event. In other
words, implicit information and inferences in discourse processing are
represented in mental models, which thus also nicely explain the notion of
presupposition, namely as the propositions in a model that are not expressed
in discourse.
Thirdly, models also provid an elegant explanation for the fact that
when people recall a text, they will usually falsely recall information that
never was expressed in the original text at all. However, if we assume that
people during understanding also construct a model of an event, and if much
of the information in such a model may be derived from more general,
sociocultural knowledge, then these false recalls can be explained in terms
of the contents of the model constructed for a text. That is, what people
remember of a text is not so much its meaning, as rather the subjective model
they build about the event the text is about. This is of course trivial when we
realize that most readers are interested not so much in the abstract meaning of
a text, but in information about reality. In sum: Understanding a text means
that people are able to construct a mental model for the text.
Fourthly, in text production, the model is the starting-point for all
processing something that other theories of language and discourse
production lack: People know something about an event, and this knowledge
is represented in their model of the event, and this model will serve as the
basis for, e.g., telling a story about the event or writing a news report about it.
Fifthly, models account for the fact that people not only represent what
they know about an event, but also for their opinions and emotions

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associated with such an event. This explains how lexical choice and other
aspects of appraisal is rooted in the ways evaluative beliefs are represented
in their mental models of events.
Finally, models explain how general knowledge is related to text
processing: Whereas models are personal, subjective and ad hoc (tied to the
present context of understanding), knowledge may be seen as a generalization
and abstraction from such models. Learning-from-ones-experiences, thus, is
typically an operation on models. Conversely, general knowledge is used by
instantiating fragments of such knowledge in specific models. Many later
experiments in cognitive psychology confirmed that models indeed play a
crucial role in understanding and recall.
What the book with Kintsch did not deal with is that besides models of
events talked or written about (models one might also call semantic
models), language users also build models of the communicative event in
which they participate. These so-called context models (or pragmatic
models) feature subjective representations of Self, the other speech
participants, the Setting (Time and Place), social characteristics and relations
between the participants and overall aims, purposes and goals.
Context models also form the mental basis of context-dependent speech
acts, style and rhetoric. That is, they control the ways information from event
models is selected and eventually expressed in discourse.
Whereas the earlier notion of mental (situation) model became very
popular in psychology, it is surprising that the equally crucial notion of
context model as yet has had little influence in the psychology of discourse
processing. This is especially also strange since it explains many problems in
a more realistic theory of discourse processing and language use, namely how
people are able to speak and write adequately in a communicative situation.
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Without context models, a theory of discourse processing in fact models what

a single speaker or writer does, without any social input as a result of
communication and interaction with other participants. Without context
models, thus, theories of discourse lack the important social and interactional
dimension. In fact, I assume that much of what Kintsch and I earlier called the
control system is in fact carried out by context models.
This notion of context models will later developed in more detail,
towards the end of the 1990s, and fully worked out in my multidisciplinary
book on context, now (in 2004-2005) in preparation. In that new context
theory it is also explained how language users manage the fundamental task
of adapting their discourses to the assumed knowledge of the recipients: Since
they are unable to represent everything recipients know in such relatively
small and strategic context models, they need simple strategies that allow
them to conclude what recipients probably know already. Crucial in this case
is the definition of knowledge as shared beliefs of a community (see below).
Whereas in this cognitive work on discourse the main focus is on
individual processing, and only limited attention was paid to general, abstract
and socially shared cognitive representations (such as knowledge) my later
work on ideology (see below) further assumed that models -- and therefore
the discourse based on them -- also feature evaluative beliefs, that is, opinions
about social and communicative events. These opinions are partly personal,
and partly based on socially shared opinion-structures, such as attitudes and
ideologies. Much of my work during the 1980s, including the work on
prejudices, focused on these social social cognitions underlying text
processing.

Discourse pragmatics
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Unlike many other researchers, I have a rather restricted conception of

pragmatics, namely, as the study of speech acts and speech act sequences.
Whereas syntax has to do with forms, semantics with meanings and reference,
pragmatics has to do with action. And whereas syntax provides rules of wellformedness, and semantics the conditions of meaningfulness, reference and
coherence, pragmatics formulates the conditions of appropriateness of
utterances defined as (speech) acts. That is, pragmatics is not the general
study of the use of language (or --as Charles Morris had put it nearly 60
years ago-- as the study of the relations between signs and their users). If
that would be the case, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics
and discourse analysis would all be part of pragmatics. This would be a
rather useless extension of the scope of pragmatics. The same is true for the
study of specific interactional strategies, such as those of politeness of
impression management. These are part of a theory of (conversational)
interaction, and not of a theory of pragmatics.
My studies on pragmatics naturally focused on the pragmatics of
discourse, and not on the pragmatics of isolated sentences (Van Dijk, 1981).
Interestingly, the theory of semantic coherence could be used as an example
for a theory of pragmatic coherence of sequences of speech acts: the speech
acts A1 and A2 are coherent if A1 is a possible condition for the appropriate
accomplishment of A2. Similarly, in the same way we may map sequences of
propositions on macropropositions, we may map sequences of speech acts on
overall, macro speech acts. For instance, pragmatically, a news report is a
macro assertion, and a ransom note a macro threat. As is the case for the
meaning of a discourse, this may also be what language users recall of a
conversation-as-action: Not so much the detailed, local speech acts, but rather
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the pragmatic upshot or point of a discourse, that is, its overall macro
speech act: He threatened me, She promised me, etc.
The notion of macro speech act is systematically related to that of
semantic macrostructures: The propositional content of a macro speech act
is typically a macroproposition. This nicely wraps up the theory of global
structures, which now not only has a formal dimension (the schematic
superstructure of a discourse), and a meaning dimension (its topics or
macrostructure), but also a pragmatic dimension (the global speech act and
possibly other communicative acts carried out by the discourse).

Discourse and racism

In 1980 my work took a rather different orientation. Also because of
my first longer stay in a Third World country, viz., during a course I taught
at the Colegio de Mexico, I finally decided it was time to do something
serious. Text grammars, and psychological theories were fascinating areas of
study, but except from their obvious applications, for instance in education
they had very little to do with real problems in this world. The time was ripe
to work on more social and political issues. One of these fundamental issues,
especially in Europe, was racism. I thus became interested in the ways racism
is expressed, reproduced or legitimated through text and talk.

Conversations

In several extensive projects, I thus systematically studied the ways

white majorities think, speak and write about ethnic minorities, immigrants,
refugees and about people from the South in general. One major project, for

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instance, focused on how members of the majority group in the Netherlands

and in California speak about the Others in everyday conversations. After
recording, transcribing and analyzing hundreds of spontaneous interviews in
various neighborhoods in Amsterdam and San Diego, my students and I soon
found that at all levels of structure, such conversations are rather typical (Van
Dijk, 1984, 1987).
For instance, at the level of topics, we found that, unlike in other
conversations, only a very limited number of topics tend to come up when
people talk about foreigners. Typically, such topics are about Cultural
Differences, about Deviance (crime, violence, etc.), and about Threats
(economic, social, cultural), thereby expressing and reproducing prevailing
stereotypes and prejudices. At the local level of semantic relations between
sentences, we found that people typically make use of specific semantic
moves, such as the disclaimers of Apparent Denial (I have nothing against
Blacks, but...) and Apparent Concession (Not all Blacks are criminal,
but...). These moves seem to locally implement the overall conversational
strategies of Positive Self-Presentation (We are not racist, we are tolerant,
etc.), and Negative Other-Presentation (the negative part following the but).
That the positive part are largely forms of face-keeping, may be inferred
from the fact that by far the largest part of the conversations are negative
about them.
In an analysis of storytelling, we further found that the obligatory
narrative category of the Resolution is often lacking in stories about
immigrants. This seems to suggest that in their mental models of ethnic
events, white people indeed do not actually see a solution for the foreignerproblem. Stories thus focus on the (usually negative) Complication, and
therefore in fact become complaint-stories that have a function in an
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argument, in which the personal experiences of the story serve as the credible
premises of negative conclusions such as They do not want to adapt or
They only come here to live of our pocket , etc.
Style, rhetoric and other formal properties of these conversations
complete this overall image. For instance, pronouns and demonstratives may
be selectively used to enhance social distance, e.g., when speakers rather refer
to their Turkish neighbors with the pronoun them or those people than
referring to them, as would be normal, with the descriptive phrase my
(Turkish) neighbors. In conversations we also found that people tend to
hesitate, make errors or repairs when they have to name the Others, a breach
of fluency that might be explained in terms of the (cognitive and social) facekeeping and impression management strategies at work in speaking about a
delicate topic such as minorities.

The Press

The other studies on the expression of ethnic prejudice and the

reproduction of racism in discourse focused on institutional, elite text and
talk. In one major project we analyzed many thousands of news reports in the
British and the Dutch press (Van Dijk, 1991). What we wanted to know, first
of all, is how mainstream newspapers write about the Others, and what role
the press plays in ethnic relations, the propagation of stereotypes, and the
reproduction of white dominance in general.
Interestingly, though not unexpectedly, many of the features of
everyday conversations can also be observed in the press, and we may
therefore assume that there are mutual relations between what the public at
large says about foreigners and what their newspapers say. For instance,

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also in the press, the selection of main topics about minorities is restricted and
stereotypical, if not negative. Again, we find the special focus on Difference,
Deviance and Threat. Ethnic crime, also in the respectable and liberal press, is
a major topic, as are the many problems associated with immigration. This
means that the positive side of immigration (contributions to the economy,
cultural variation, etc.) will seldom be topical in the press. Minorities are
always portrayed as Problem People, whereas the problems we cause for
them, such as, lack of hospitality, harsh immigration laws, discrimination
and racism, are seldom major topics.
Quotation patterns are similarly predictable. By its own rules of
balance, one would expect the press to always quote also competent and
credible minority spokespersons about ethnic events. Nothing is less true,
however: Especially white (majority) institutions and elites are quoted. And
when minorities are quoted, they are not allowed speak alone. This is
especially the case when embarrassing topics such as discrimination or racism
come up: If the Others are allowed to speak about that, it is always marked as
an unwarranted accusation, as alleged racism or as racism between
quotation marks, and not as a fact.
These biased structures, which may also be observed in disclaimers,
descriptions of minority actors, the structure of headlines, style and rhetoric,
may be expected when we realize that the newsroom of most newspapers in
Europe is still virtually white: Very few minority journalists work for major
newspapers, and virtually never at the higher editorial levels. Similarly,
minority organizations and spokespersons are found less credible, less
objective, and therefore have less access to the press.
The conclusion from this large-scale research was therefore that
although in some respects the press merely reflects what the politicians or the
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general public are saying about minorities, they also have their own role and
responsibility in ethnic affairs, especially because of their immense scope and
power. Unlike a biased ordinary speaker in a conversation, a biased news
report or editorial may have hundreds of thousands, and --as is the case for the
British tabloids-- sometimes millions of readers, and therefore have a
tremendous influence. In our research on everyday conversations, we
frequently were able to observe this influence of the press (Van Dijk, 1987).
This is why we concluded that the press in Europe plays a central role in
maintaining (and sometimes aggravating) the ethnic status quo, if not in the
reproduction of racism.

News as discourse

These studies of the role of the press in the reproduction of racism run
parallel with another project in the 1980s, viz., a systematic study into the
structures, production and reception of news in the press (Van Dijk, 1988a,
1998b). Strikingly, very little discourse analytical work had been done on this
most pervasive form of written discourse in our everyday lives. In several
theoretical and empirical studies, I thus tried to extend discourse analysis to
one of its most obvious domains of application: mass communication
research. I assumed that news discourse had a canonical structure or news
schema that organizes news reports, beginning with the well-known
categories of the Headline and the Lead, together forming the higher level
category of Summary (which we find in many discourse types, as for instance
also in scholarly articles) followed by such categories as Recent Events,
Previous Events, Context, History and Comments. I emphasized the fact that
also news production is largely a form of text processing, namely, of the many

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source texts (written or spoken) the journalists use when writing a news
report. One of the empirical studies examined how in the world press one
event (viz., the assassination of presentident-elect Bechir Gemayel of
Lebanon in September 1982) was covered. Hundreds of stories in a large
number of newspapers in many languages were systematically analyzed to see
whether there are universals of news reports, and/or whether news reports in
different countries, languages, cultures and political systems would typically
provide a different picture of the event. One of our conclusions of this
research was that news reports across the world, possibly under the influence
of the format of the reports of international news agencies, were suprising
similar despite different political and cultural contexts. Differences exist
rather between the quality press and the tabloid, popular press within the same
country.

Textbooks

Another important source for ethnic stereotypes and prejudices, of

which millions of children are the daily victims, are textbooks at school. We
therefore analyzed social science textbooks from secondary schools in the
Netherlands, and posed the same questions as in the other projects: What do
they say about minorities, and what is their role in the reproduction of
prejudice and racism (Van Dijk, 1987).
Although, especially in the USA, the situation is slowly improving with
the introduction of more multicultural learning materials, most textbooks,
especially in Europe, continue either to ignore minorities altogether (thus
implying that Europe --and the classrooms -- are still homogeneously
white), or tend to confirm simple stereotypes or even racist prejudices.
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Minorities as well as people of the South in general, are thus represented not
only as poor, backward, or primitive, but also as criminal and aggressive,
as also is the case in the media and everyday conversations. Especially
cultural deviance, viz., other habits, another language or another religion is
focused upon and problematized. As is elsewhere the case in institutional and
elite discourse on ethnic affairs, discrimination and racism are seldom
topicalized, or even denied.

Parliamentary debates and other elite discourse

Another major domain involved in the public discourse of ethnic

affairs, is politics. We therefore analyzed the parliamentary debates about
immigration, minorities or affirmative action, in the Netherlands, France,
Germany, Great-Britain and the USA (Van Dijk, 1993). Obviously, such
public, official discourse is seldom openly racist, with the exception of the
statements of members of extremist right-wing parties. However, in a more
indirect and subtle way, we find many of the typical features of foreignertalk we also found in the media and textbooks.
Especially interesting are the many strategic moves used to limit
immigration or the rights of minorities. Blaming the victim is a major move:
Minorities are blamed for their own marginal position, their lack of work and
housing, and so on. It is suggested that it is better for them if they stay in
their own country so that they can build that up. Rather cynically it may be
added in such discourse that it would be better for them if they would not be
confronted with the racism in the poor neighborhoods where they would have
to live. And of course, immigration and immigrants will primarily be

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associated with financial, employment and housing problems, if not with

crime drugs, and so on.

Corporate discourse

Given their role in employment and the labor market, also the discourse
of corporate managers was studied, viz., on the basis of interviews with
personnel managers (Van Dijk, 1993). As may be expected, corporate
managers, like other white elites, will of course deny that in their company
discrimination or racism takes place. At the same time, most of them,
especially in the Netherlands, are adamantly opposed to any form of
Affirmative Action (which they will call Reverse discrimination). They may
be concerned about minority unemployment (in Holland three or more times
as high as majority unemployment), but they will always blame the Others:
They dont speak our language, they have a different culture, they have
insufficient education, they lack motivation, and so on. That other research
shows that more than 60% of employers rather hire white men, than women or
minority men, is obviously not part of their dominant explanations of minority
unemployment. Neither is that the case in debates in politics and the media: If
minorities have problems, they will somehow always be caused by
themselves.

Elite discourse

21

As was shown also for academic discourse such as contemporary

sociology handbooks, all these forms of dominant, majority discourses, and
especially the various genres of elite discourse, show many resemblances.
Besides the ideological prejudices and stereotypes, we thus find textual
stereotypes in the ways minorities and ethnic relations tend to be described.
The major strategy in such text and talk, is that of positive self-presentation
and negative other-presentation. Our racism is systematically denied or at
least mitigated, whereas Their negative characteristics are focused upon and
emphasized. If racism exists in our society, then it should be sought for in
the inner city ghettos, that is, among the poor whites, and never among the
elites of the boardrooms, classrooms, newsrooms, or courtrooms. Elites tend
to present themselves as tolerant and modern, while blaming the poor social
victims. At the same time, populist politics will precisely (and
democratically) refer to the resentment among the people against further
immigration. Nowhere is the denial of racism so routine as among the elites.
Also because of their role in decision making, teaching, research,
employment, the bureaucracy, information and communication, the elites and
their ethnic ideologies and practices have a tremendous impact on society.
Although maybe seldom very overt and harsh, the elites often merely
preformulate what will be soon accepted in (white) society at large. In other
words, elites play a central role in the reproduction of racism. They are the
ones that control public discourse, and since racism is primarily learned
through such public discourse, the elites are primarily responsible for the
reproduction of racism in society. This may also mean that they may be
primary responsible for the reproduction of antiracism in society and that
strategies of resistance and change should focus on the top (Van Dijk,
1993).

22

In the mid-1990s this research on political racism was further extended

in a large project directed by my friend and colleague Ruth Wodak at the
University of Vienna and myself, with the cooperation of a team of
researchers in various countries, including Luisa Martn Rojo, Ineke van der
Valk, Jessika Ter Wal, Lena Jones, Martin Reisigl, and Maria Sedlak. We
collected parliamentary debates on immigration and other ethnic issues in
seven western European countries (Austria, the Netherlands, Great Britain,
France, Germany, Italy and Spain) and systematically analyzed the contents
and structures of such debates. We thus found how racism and only seldom
antiracism -- was produced and reproduced at the top society, and how
politicians thus also give the bad example in society apart from making vital
decisions about the lives of immigrants and minorities (Wodak & Van Dijk,
2000).
Finally, after emigrating to Spain in 1999, I also paid more attention to
racism in Spain and Latin America, and wrote a book on that topic (Van Dijk,
2003), and started an international project in Latin America with teams of
seven countries studying discursive racism. The results of this project will
hopefully be published in a book to appear in English, Spanish and
Portuguese.
This research on racism in society also took an organizational
dimension in the arly 1990s, when a group of European scholars formed an
International Association for the Study of Racism (IASR), with Laura Balbo
(Italy) as President, and with me as General Secretary. Unfortunately, after
several meetings of the board, lack of money, assistance and time forced this
organization into a state of lethargy from which it has not yet been waken up.

The consequences of doing antiracist research

23

One other experience from this long-term research project on racism

was that such critical research is not without consequences. Whereas in earlier
research on text grammar I already had experienced to say the least -- lack
of interest among Dutch linguists, the study of racism was generally met with
downright hostility in the Netherlands. Financial support for this kind of
research was very hard, if not impossible to get, also for my assistants and
PhD students working on this topic. The Dutch elites, not least the scholars
and journalists, did not want to be accused of racism and further ignored
the data that proved otherwise.
This attitude took an even more aggressive dimension when I pointed
out that one of the major poets of the Netherlands, Gerrit Komrij, not only had
published racist columns under his own name in the newspaper, but probably
also was involved in a practical joke by publishing a racist, islamophobic
pamphlet under a pseudonym. The complete Dutch press, journalists,
commentators, columnists, etc. attacked me in this case, and nobody wanted
to believe me, despite the numerous striking similarities between the racist
pamphlet and the columns of the writer who dragged me to court for
slander, a case which however he lost: the judges were right when concluding
that this famous writer, with his column in a major Dutch newspaper (NRCHandelsblad), which incidentally had published the first installment of the
racist pamphlet, could very well defend himself. Which he did: in several
columns he attacked me virulently, ridiculing discourse studies, and trying to
get me fired by the University of Amsterdam.
When years later I published a book on the whole affair (Van Dijk,
2003), with extensive arguments and demonstrations of the involvement of
the famous writer in this affair, no publisher dared to publish the book, and

24

when I published the book on my own account, the press suddenly fell silent:
despite its obviously burning topic, not a single book review of the book was
published, so that the book was totally unknown and ignored by the public at
large selling hardly more than 150 copies.

Critical Discourse Analysis

Parallel to this vast and ongoing research project on discourse and
racism, the early 1990s required extension of this work to the more general
study of discourse, power and ideology. Thus, in various articles I examined
the ways access to (public) discourse, e.g., that of the media, is distributed
over various groups of people. I found that access to discourse is a scarce
social resource for people, and that in general the elites may also be defined in
terms of their preferential access to, if not control over public discourse. Such
control may extend to the features of the context (Time, Place, Participants),
as well as to the various features of the text (topics, style, and so on).
More generally, thus, I focused on the role of power, and how power is
also discursively reproduced, enacted and legitimated in society. I emphasized
that power is not only a way to control the acts of other people, but also their
minds, and such mind control, which is again at the basis of action control, is
largely discursive. In other words, discourse plays a fundamental role in the
cycle of the reproduction of social power.
Against this background, and together with other researchers in
discourse analysis and related disciplines, it was increasingly emphasized in
the 1980s and 1990s that discourse analysis should also have a critical
dimension. That is, in the choice of its orientation, topics, problems, issues
25

and methods, discourse analysis should actively participate, in its own

academic way, in social debates, and do research that would serve those who
need it most, rather than those who can pay most.
In various articles I stressed that CDA is not a theory or a method. Any
adequate method may be used in CDA research. Rather, CDA is a movement
of theoretically very different -- scholars who focus on social issues and not
primarily on academic paradigms. We typically study the many forms of (the
abuse of) power in relations of gender, ethnicity and class, such as sexism and
racism. We want to know how discourse enacts, expresses, condones or
contributes to the reproduction of inequality. At the same time, we listen to
the experiences and the opinions of dominated groups, and study the most
effective ways of resistance and dissent.
Given this increasing interest in critical studies, I took the initiative to
organize critical scholars in many countries into an international network
called CRITICS (Centers for Research Into Texts, Information and
Communication in Society), with its own list on the internet (CRITICS-L).
A group of (mostly) European scholars has been meeting annually,
since a first meeting I organized in Amsterdam in the early 1990s. We were
thus able to stimulate the development of a more critical approach to the study
of language, communication and discourse. Regular participants in these
meetings were Lilie Chouliaraki (Copenhagen), Bessie Dendrinos (Athens),
Norman Fairclough (Lancaster and now Bucharest), Gunther Kress (London),
Luisa Martn Rojo (Madrid), Ron Scollon (Georgetown), Teun A. van Dijk
(Amsterdam and later Barcelona), Theo van Leeuwen (London and later
Cardiff), and Ruth Wodak (Vienna and now Lancaster), occasionally joined
by others at the different locations in Europe where we met.

26

Already in 1990 I had founded the international journal Discourse &

Society as a major forum for this more critical, social-political work. This
journal soon became quite popular and prestigious, also because of its
prominent place in the international citation hierarchy it became the most
cited journal in communication world wide, and even among the most cited in
several other disciplines. After this, I founded another discourse journal,
Discourse Studies, with a more general editorial policy.

Ideology
One of the central projects within the general orientation towards
critical discourse studies is my study on ideology, initiated around 1995. In
this project I could combine earlier ideas from the cognitive study of
discourse, as developed in the project with Walter Kintsch, with later ideas on
social cognition, power, racism, and the reproduction of power through
discourse. That is, racist ideologies are not alone, and in order to explain their
influence in society we need a more general theory of ideology. I therefore set
up a large, long-term project in which the first study sketched the overall
framework, based on the crucial notions of discourse, cognition and society
(Van Dijk, 1998). In later projects I would then develop each partial theory,
that is, the relations between ideology and social cognition, between ideology
and society and finally between ideology and discourse.
The crucial concept of ideology I proposed is defined in terms of the
fundamental cognitive beliefs that are at the basis of the social representations
shared by the members of of a group. Thus, people may have ideological
racist or sexist beliefs (e.g., about inequality) that are at the basis of racist and
sexist prejudices shared by the members in their group, and that condition
27

their discourse and other social practices. We thus at the same time are able to
link ideologies with discourse, and hence with the ways they are
(discursively) reproduced, as well as the ways members of a group represent
and reproduce their social position and conditions in their social cognitions
and discourses. In other words, I thus presented a theory that also bridges the
well-known cognition-society gap, and hence the micro-macro gap, that
continues to plague the humanities and the social sciences. That is, ideologies
control social representations of groups, and thus the social practices and
discourses of their members. This happens through the ideological control of
mental models which in turn, as we have seen above, control the meaning and
the functions of discourses, interaction and communication. And conversely,
ideologies may be learned (and taught) through the generalization of mental
models, that is, the personal experiences of social members. The theory thus
accounts for all phases in the cycle that relates ideology with discourse and
other social practices.
One of the major problems of a theory of ideology is the question of the
internal structure of ideologies: what indeed does an (anti)racist,
(anti)sexist, socialist or neoliberal ideology look like? What exactly are its
contents? Despite thousands of books on ideology, this and many other
questions have never been answered explicitly. In my ideology project I
postulate that ideologies, as many other cognitive representations, have a
schematic organization, consisting of a number of fixed categories defining
the identity or self-image of a group, such as their actions, aims, norms,
relations with other groups and resources. Another problem of the theory is its
social basis: what kind of social groups typically develop ideologies? I hope
to be able to deal with that question in a future book on ideology and society.

28

Knowledge
The next step in the mega-project on ideology was the theory of social
cognition of which ideology was supposed to be part. However, this
presupposes, among other things, a detailed theory of the relations between
ideology and knowledge. However, when I started to write a book on ideology
and social cognition, I soon found out despite the thousands of books on
knowledge, that there is no general theory of knowledge. There is a traditional
concept of knowledge in epistemology as justified true beliefs, but the
debates on this notion were so arcane and so little related to what was known
on knowledge in the social sciences and even in common sense that a new
approach was needed.
In a number of papers, I thus started with a new, more pragmatic and
more empirical, working definition of knowledge as the certified shared
beliefs of (epistemic) communities, based on the (epistemic) criteria of the
community which tell their members which beliefs are accepted and shared
as knowledge. This means that knowledge is systematically presupposed in
the discourses of such a community, because all speakers know that all the
other members already have such knowledge. This also provides a basis for a
theory of context that explains how language users manage their discourses as
a function of what they know recipients know already (see below).
Such a new theory of knowledge must also explain what kinds or types
of knowledge there are. I therefore proposed a modest typology of
knowledge, involving different criteria, such as social scope (personal
knowledge, interpersonal knowledge, social group knowledge, national
knowledge and cultural knowledge), abstract vs. concrete, general vs.
specific, fictional vs. real, etc.
29

Finally, this theory also explains the relations between ideology and
knowledge. Often, also in CDA, it is assumed that knowledge is ideologically
based. This, however, is theoretically unsatisfactory. If all knowledge is
ideologically based and hence different for each group in society, we would
not have knowledge in common, across groups, and that would mean that we
could not presuppose such common knowledge, and would not understand
each other which is not true.
That is, people may, for instance, have different opinions on abortion or
immigration, but ideological debates presuppose that people of different
ideological groups have knowledge in common: they know what immigration
and abortion is. That is, not all knowledge is based on ideology, but all
ideology is based on general, culturally shared knowledge, presupposed in all
public discourses of such a community. Within groups however, people may
have ideologically based knowledge knowledge which others, outside the
group, may well call mere beliefs, opinions, prejudices or superstitions, as
one may find about religious or racist knowledge.
This concept of knowledge makes it essentially relative: knowledge is
defined relative to the communities in which it is ratified and shared. This
also implies that knowledge may change what earlier might just be beliefs
of some scholars or social movements, may later become generally shared
knowledge, and vice versa, what once was generally accepted belief, and
hence knowledge (e.g. about God, or that the earth is flat), is now generally
considered as a mere belief. Note though that also the relatively of knowledge
is itself relative as it should be namely in the sense that within
communities, knowledge is of course not relative at all: what we generally
accept as knowledge is taken as the basis of all our discourse and interaction.

30

In my further work on knowledge, which should eventually result in a

monograph on discourse and knowledge, I hope to further develop this theory
of knowledge and show how discourse is produced and understood on the
basis of knowledge. This also provides a broader, multidisciplinary basis, to
the more limited psychological theory of knowledge so far used in the
psychology of text processing, as well as the necessary building blocks for the
sociocognitive theory of ideology.

Context
Finally, there is another notion that needed further theoretical
development: context. More than 25 years ago, I wrote a book on text and
context (Van Dijk, 1977), but in that book I talk much more about text than
about context which I reduced to some formal, pragmatic parameters, but
did not investigate as such, let alone linked with a theory of discourse
structures and contextualization.
Parallel to my work on ideology and knowledge, and sometimes closely
related to it, I therefore conceived the idea to clarify the notion of context.
The problem was that although there were thousands of books with the notion
of context in their titles, there was not a single monograph on context itself.
Indeed, also in linguistics and discourse studies, the notion was generally
used in a very informal sense, for instance as the situation or environment of
discourse, social practices or other phenomena being studied.
However, this was theoretically unsatisfactory, especially because
social contexts as such cannot influence text or talk. What we need is some
kind of interface. And as we have seen before, such an interface between
society and discourse needs to be cognitive: It is the way people understand
31

or interpret their social environment that constitutes the context of their

discourse and social practices. Fortunately, we have an excellent theoretical
and empirically sound notion to account for such subjective interpretations of
events or situations: mental models. This is why I proposed that contexts be
theorized in terms of special mental models in episodic memory: context
models. These context models or simply contexts control all levels and
aspects of discourse production and discourse understanding, such as their
genre, forms, style, variation and in general how a discourse is adapted to the
communicative situation.
Like other mental models, also context models consist of a limited
number of categories, such as a Setting, Participants and Actions, with further
subcategories such as Time, Place, Identities, Roles, Aims and Knowledge.
Such a rather simple schematic structure allows language users to quickly
analyze and define social situations on line and thus to control their discourse
production as a function of their model (definition) of the communicative
situation. Since context models are subjective, this also means that different
participants may have different models of the current situation, and this may
of course lead to misunderstanding and conflict.
Context models thus explain many issues in discourse and discourse
processing. They form the missing links between society and contextually
adequate discourse. They explain communication conflicts. They define what
style is discourse variation as a function of context models. And they
explain how language users and not situations control discourse as a
function of communicative situations.
One of the crucial components of context models is knowledge.
Language users adapt what they say or write to what they believe or know the
recipients know already. That is, they need a model of the knowledge of the

32

recipients and strategies of adapting their discourse to such a model. I

therefore proposed in several papers to introduce a special device in context
models, namely the K-device. This knowledge device has as its task to
calculate at each point in the production of a discourse what recipients already
know (in general, or because of earlier discourses, or because of the preceding
part of the discourse), and hence to decide what knowledge to presuppose,
assert or remind at this point in the discourse. Such strategies obviously are
based on what each member shares with other members of epistemic
communities. In this way, I was able to connect the project on knowledge
with that on context. And since people not only share knowledge in
communities, but also ideologies in social groups, something similar an
ideologial device or I-device may be postulated for the management of
ideologically adequate (politically correct) discourse within ideological
groups.
In later work, I thus hope to integrate various ongoing projects, such as
those on ideology, knowledge and context, because it has become obvious
that such notions always need to be studied in their mutual relations: Text and
talk is impossible without knowledge. It is impossible without contextual
control and constraints. And much socially relevant discourse is ideological.
Hence, we need to understand how such different forms of socially
shared or distributed cognitions as knowledge and ideologies are related.
How they further define and explain vague traditional notions such as
attitudes and social representations. In other words, all these projects try to
elucidate how discourse is related to social cognition and society, and within
an overall critical perspective, in which theoretical advances are constantly
influencing and inspired by critical work, for instance on racism, the media,

33

politics, textbooks, and other important social discourses that produce power
and power abuse.

Contributions
Summarizing some of the contributions I have attempted to make with
my work in the past decades, I might venture the following:
Some aspects of literary semiotics.
Some aspects of a generative theory of literature.
The semantics of poetic language.
The foundations of text grammar.
Various aspects of text semantics, such as conditions of local and
global coherence, theory of connectives, etc..
The theory of macrostructures in discourse, cognition and action.
The theory of discourse pragmatics, e.g., the notion of macro speech
act.
The theory of narrative.
Various aspects of the theory of discourse processing, such as the
theory of dynamic, strategic processing (with Walter Kintsch)
The theory of mental models (with Walter Kintsch)
The general foundations of a theory of discourse.
34

 The theory of elite racism.

Many aspects of the theory, analysis and case studies of racist
discourse.
The social psychology of the discursive reproduction of prejudice and
racism.
The study of racism in the press.
The study of racism in textbooks.
The study of racism in everyday storytelling.
The study of racism in political discourse (parliamentary debates).
The theory of news discourse, e.g., of news schemata, news production,
and comprehension.
Case studies of news analysis, e.g., of international news.
The study of social cognition and discourse.
The foundations of critical discourse studies.
The discursive study of power.
The theory of ideology.
Some aspects of a theory of knowledge and discourse.
The theory of context, e.g., of context models.
Publication of many books and articles on these topics.
Many lectures and courses in many universities in many countries, but
especially in Latin America.
The foundation and editing of four international journals.
The editing of two handbooks of discourse studies.
Setting up and maintaining a personal website with resources for
critical discourse studies.

35

 Contribution to the foundation of various international organizations,

such as ALED, IASR, CRITICS, etc.

36

Conclusions
The academic itinerary and contributions sketched above, like all
stories and accounts, also needs a conclusion, if not a moral. After more than
35 years of doing discourse analysis, one should have learned something
about the discipline and its practitioners. One important point to emphasize is
that despite the variety of the topics I studied, and the broad orientation of my
work as a scholar, I have only a very limited grasp of what goes on nowadays,
in many countries, in the now very vast field of discourse studies. There are
several domains and directions of research I barely know. However, as a
founder and editor of several international journals, first of Poetics and
TEXT, and now of Discourse & Society and Discourse Studies, and as an
editor of the Handbook of Discourse Analysis (1985) and another two-volume
introduction, Discourse Studies, An multidisciplinary contribution (1997), I
have always tried to promote, stimulate, integrate, unify and further develop
the many different domains of studying text and talk, as one new crossdiscipline of discourse studies.
I thus have tried to bridge gaps, first between the study of language and
literature, then between the grammar of sentences and discourses, as well as
the theories of the relations between action and discourse, between discourse
and cognition. and finally also between cognition and society. I have argued
for a more social approach in the cognitive psychology of discourse
processing, and for a more sociocognitive approach in critical, sociopolitical
discourse studies. I have resisted and criticized the formation of schools and
sects and instead propagated multidisciplinary, broadly based endeavors,
against tendencies of reductionism. Discourse studies should be as
theoretically explicit as diverse, integrating all relevant domains of
37

linguistics, pragmatics, psychology, communication studies and the other

social social sciences.
Fortunately, through the journals and as author and editor of books I am
able to influence this process a little bit, but obviously cannot do so alone.
And whatever the theoretical and organizational endeavors, the ultimate aim
is and should be a contribution to a critical analysis of society, including
critical teaching of our students.
Another important conclusion is that my work represents several of
many orientations, methods, theories, and directions of research. Emerging
from French Structuralism in poetics and semiotics, it soon focused on
modern linguistics, then on cognitive psychology and then the social sciences.
There are many domains, methods, and approaches in discourse analysis, and
I always have learned from all of them.
My aim has always been to be clear and pedagogical, and to avoid
esoteric writing: The crucial criterion must always be that also our students,
and not only the initiated, can read and understand our work. Obscure writing
not only precludes understanding, but is inconsistent with the fundamental
aims of critical discourse studies.
Much to the regret of some of my readers, I have avoided to remain in
one domain, problem or paradigm, and always have changed fields in order to
explore new ways and problems of doing discourse analysis. I may only hope
that more people in discourse analysis would more often be foolish enough
to leave their current field in which they feel so well at home, and start to
explore neighboring fields. It is precisely at the boundaries of fields and
disciplines that new phenomena are observed and new theories developed.
As may be obvious from the account above, discourse analysis for me
is essentially multidisciplinary. It involves linguistics, poetics, semiotics,

38

pragmatics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and communication

research. Because of multi-faceted nature of discourse, this multidisciplinary
research should be integrated. We should devise theories that are complex and
account both for the textual, the cognitive, the social, the political and the
historical dimension of discourse. Indeed, a problem such as racism cannot be
fully understood in light of only one discipline, or in terms of simple theories.
With the discipline as a whole, I have learned much about discourse
during the last 35 years. And yet, at the same time I know that much of what
we know is incomplete and misguided. I am not afraid to make mistakes, and
see this as the inevitable problem of all new disciplines and original
explorations of uncharted territories. If only we are willing to admit such
errors later, when other research shows that and where we were wrong.
Compared to the primitive text grammars of the early 1970s, contemporary
formal work on discourse structures is of course much more sophisticated.
And compared to the simplistic cognitive, social and interactional models of
text and talk of 20 years ago, new work on text processing, socio-political
discourse studies and conversational analysis also has much advanced.
In the 40 years of modern discourse studies, many different discourse
genres in many social domains have been studied: those in politics, the media,
education, the law, and so on. Levels and dimensions, as well as analytical
categories, have been multiplied, so that contemporary discourse analysis is
incomparably more complex and empirically more precise that four decades
ago. Whereas in the 1960s we were just a few in some disciplines interested
in the study of discourse. Today, many thousand of scholars in many
disciplines and in many countries yearly produce thousands of books and tens
of thousands of articles on hundreds of topics and subdisciplines. Although
seldom academically exercized in special departments or programs, discourse
39

studies has become a mature cross-discipline, with its own journals,

handbooks, congresses and specializations.
Yet, there is still a lot to do. There are still fields that are
underdeveloped (as is the case for the political science of discourse). And
more importantly, we only now have begun to study discourse in the much
more relevant framework of serious social issues, such as racism and sexism.
In my view, the real value of discourse analysis as a discipline in society
depends on its contributions to the solution of such problems.

Moral
Conventional stories end with a special category variously called
moral, coda, lesson, and so on. This category features meanings that do
not look back, but draw inferences of the story for today and tomorrow.
Stories are to entertain, but often also to teach what we have learned from
remarkable everyday experiences.
The preceding pages are not exactly a story. Yet they are about what I
did in the past, and hence they are part of an intellectual life history. Since I
also have learned from both my personal and my academic experiences, also
this very succinct account of my scholarly activities of the last 35 years or so
might feature some kind of Moral.
This Moral will not present Big and Wise Lessons of the Mature
Scholar, but only a few modest comments on my way of doing and viewing
scholarship in the areas in which I have been active. These comments are by
definition very subjective and personal, and not at all intended either as
recommendation to young scholars simply because there are many
legitimate, interesting and useful ways to do and view scholarship.

40

The students

In the preceding pages I have not mentioned the students, as if research

had nothing to do with them. Let me therefore begin by emphasizing that they
are crucial not only in the life of a teacher, but also in the work of an
investigator. Many of the ideas I have presented here have first been
formulated in the classroom. Dialogue and critical questions of more or less
smart students are one of the best tests for scholarly ideas. It they do not
understand what we try to convey, we may be sure that we have not yet fully
understood a problem. I am convinced that, at least in our field, virtually any
theoretical issue can be explained to students. One of the main reasons why I
have increasingly emphasized the transparency of our writing style, is to make
sure that our papers and books are accessible to the main audience for our
work: students and scholars from other fields. As founding editor of the
international journals Poetics, Text, Discourse & Society and Discourse
Studies, I have insisted that authors avoid the esoteric writing that is so
popular in some circles. Within the framework of critical discourse studies,
such a norm is particularly relevant when we realize that scholarship should
not be limited to the happy few, the initiated or to the blind followers of a
guru. When writing a paper for a journal, one should first of all ask a few
motivated students to give their opinion about our work.
And not only our work should be accessible to students, but also we
should be accessible to them. One of the many complaints of students about
their university study is that many of their teachers are barely accessible
these do not respond to students e-mails, they have no time to see them, and
more generally are distant professors. Obviously, such behavior does not

41

exactly motivate students to engage in our field of specialization or in

university study in general.

On Schools and Masters

What is true for our relations with the students, is also true for our
relations with our (other) readers. The accessibility of our work is crucial for
any kind of scholarship, and especially critical studies. Instead of having
readers who admire and imitate us, we should have readers who can
understand and criticize us, and who go beyond our own work to formulate
new, original ideas. Few things in my academic career have irritated me more
than the sect-like nature of some theoretical schools, led by a Master whose
followers are more like slaves than independent scholars who also seek
inspiration elsewhere. This is especially the case for those Masters whose
work is so arcane that the only way to understand him is to imitate him him,
because mostly these Masters are men. There are examples of serious
theoretical errors that have not been corrected for decades only because the
followers of a Master uncritically repeated such errors without independent
investigation.
When some students in their enthusiasm to have found what they were
looking for too exclusively focused on my work, I have always suggested to
only cite my work where relevant, as of any scholar, but especially to look for
other work. No serious issue in critical discourse studies, and especially
complex social problems such as racism, or theoretical topic such as discourse
and their relations to knowledge or ideology are being fully treated by one
person.

42

References (only books)

For a complete publication list, see www.discourse-in-society.org

In English:

Some Aspects of Text Grammars (The Hague: Mouton, 1972)

Pragmatics of Language and Literature (Ed.). (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1976).

Text and Context (London: Longman, 1977)

Discourse and Descriptions (with Jnos Petfi, Eds).(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1977).

Macrostructures (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1980)

Studies in the Pragmatics of Discourse (The Hague: Mouton, 1981)

Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (with W. Kintsch; New York: Academic

Press, 1983)

Prejudice in Discourse (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1984)

Discourse and Communication (Ed.)(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985)

Discourse and Literature (Ed.). (Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1985).

Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Ed.)(4 vols., London: Academic Press, 1985)

Communicating Racism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987).

Approaches to discourse, poetics and psychiatry (with Iris Zavala y Myrian DizDiocaretz, Eds.). (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987).

Discourse and Discrimination (with Geneva Smitherman, Eds.). (Detroit, MI: Wayne
State University Press, 1988).

News as Discourse (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988).

News Analysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988).

Racism and the Press (London: Routledge, 1991).

Elite Discourse and Racism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993).

Discourse, racism and ideology (La Laguna, RCEI Editores, 1997).

Discourse Studies. 2 vols. (Ed.). (London: Sage, 1997).

Ideology (London, Sage, 1998).

Racism at the Top (with Ruth Wodak, Eds.). (Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag, 2000).

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Communicating Ideologies (with Martin Ptz, JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer, Eds.).

(Frankfurt: Lang, 2004).

Racism and Discourse in Spain and Latin America (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005)

In preparation:

Context. A Multidisciplinary Theory.

Books published in Spanish (books with a *star have no counterpart of a

book published in English):

Texto y contexto. (Madrid: Catedra, 1980).

La ciencia del texto. (Barcelona/Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1983).

*Las estructuras y funciones del discurso. (Mxico: Siglo XXI, 1981).

La notcia como discurso. Comprensin, estructura y produccin de la informacin.

(Barcelona, Paidos, 1990).

*Prensa, poder y racismo. (Mexico: Editorial Universidad Ibero-Americana, 1995).

*Racismo y anlisis crtico de los medios. (Barcelona, Paidos, 1997).

Anlisis del discurso social y poltico (with Ivn Rodrigo M.). (Quito: Abya-Yala,
1999).

Discurso y literatura. Nuevos planteamientos sobre el anlisis de los gneros

literarios. (Madrid: Visor, 1999).

Ideologa (Barcelona, Gedisa, 2000).

Estudios del discurso. 2 vols. (Barcelona, Gedisa, 2001).

Ideologa y Discurso (Barcelona, Ariel, 2003)

Racismo y discurso de las lites (Barcelona, Ariel, 2003).

Discriminacin tnica y racismo discursivo en Espaa y Amrica Latina (Barcelona:

Gedisa, 2003).

Racismo y Discurso en Amrica Latina (Barcelona, Gedisa, 2007)

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In Italian

Per una poetica generativa (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1976).

Testo e contesto (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1981).

*Il discorso razzista. La riproduzione del pregiudizio nei discorsi quotidiani.

(Messina: Rubbettino, 1999).

Ideologie. Discorso e construzione sociale del pregiudizio. A cura di Paola Villano.

(Roma, Carocci, 2004).

In Portuguese

*Discurso, cognico, interaco (So Paulo: Contexto, 1992)..

Discurso, Notcia e Idoelogia. Estudos na Anlise Crtica do Discurso. Porto:

Campo das Letras.

In Dutch

*Moderne literatuurteorie. Een experimentele inleiding. (Modern Theory of

Literature. An experimental introduction). (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1970).

*Taal, Tekst, Teken. Bijdragen tot the literatuurtheorie. (Language, Text, Sign.
Contributions to the theory of literature). (Amsterdam: Athenaeum, 1971).

*Het Literatuuronderwijs op school (Teaching literature at school). (Amsterdam:

Van Gennep, 1977).

*Taal en Handeling. (Language and Action). (Muiderberg: Coutinho, 1978a).

*Tekstwetenschap. (Discourse Studies). (Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1978b).

*Minderheden in de Media. (Minorities in the Media). (Amsterdam: SUA, 1981).

*Schoolvoorbeelden van Racisme. De reproductie van racisme in

maatschappijleerboeken. (Textbook examples of racism. The reproduction on
racism in social science textbooks). (Amsterdam: SUA, 1987)

*De Rasoel-Komrij Affaire. Een geval van elite-racisme. (The Rasoel-Komrij

Affair. A case of elite racism). (Amsterdam: Critics, 1993).

45

In German

*Zur Bestimmung narrativer Strukturen auf der Grundlage von Textgrammatiken

(with J. Ihwe, H. Rieser & J. Petfi). (Hamburg: Buske Verlag, 1972). Second
edition, 1974.

*Beitrge zur generativen Poetik. (Mnchen: Bayerischer Schulbuch Verlag, 1972).

*Textwissenschaft. Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1980.

In Russian
*Jazyk, poznanie, kommunikatsia (Language, Cognition and Communication).
(Moscow: Progress, 1989)

In Chinese

*Society, cognition and discourse. Beijing: China Book Company, 1993.

In Polish

Dyskurs jako struktura i proces. (Ed.). (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN,

2001).

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For further details, see Publication List: www.discourses.org

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