Society and Discourse: How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk

After his earlier book Discourse and Context, also published by Cambridge University Press, Teun A. van Dijk in this study presents the second part of his multidisciplinary theory of context. The main thesis of this theory is that the influence of society on discourse is not direct, as is postulated for instance in sociolinguistics, but cognitively mediated by subjective mental models of the communicative situation: context models. These dynamic models control discourse production and compr...