Paper CDA Congress
Macro Contexts
Teun A. van Dijk
Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Second draft, May 2005
Introduction
In linguistics, discourse analysis and most of the humanities and social
sciences it has become a truism that all phenomena are understood and hence
should be explained as part of their ‘context’. It is not surprising,
therefore, that there are thousands of books that feature the concept of
‘context’ in their titles. Despite this vast amount of ‘contextual’ studies,
however, there is not a single monograph
that provides an explicit theory of context¸ although there edited books on
context (e.g., Duranti & Goodwin, 1992).
This means that the notion is commonly used in a more or less informal way,
namely to refer to the explanatory situation or environment of some phenomenon,
that is, its conditions and consequences.
This is also true in linguistics and discourse analysis, where the notion
of ‘context’ should be made explicit for many reasons, if only because of its
etymological meaning as an environment of ‘text’: con-text. This may mean, on
the one hand, the verbal context of words or sentences, that is structures of
text or talk, and on the other hand the social situation in which a
communicative event takes place. In discourse analysis, verbal context needs no
special treatment, since it is precisely one of the major aims of discourse
analysis to study the discursive ‘surroundings’ of words and sentences, for
instance in the study of coherence, co-reference, anaphora, and so on.
The other notion of context, accounting for the situatedness of talk or
text, however, still needs explicit theorizing, for instance in terms of
settings, relevant properties of participants and their social identities,
roles and relations, as well as the social actions performed in such a
situation. In systemic functional linguistics, there has been sustained
interest in the notion of ‘context of situation’ for a long time (see, e.g.,
Ghadessy, 1999; Leckie-Tarry, 1995), articulated in terms of the notions of
‘field’, ‘tenor’ and ‘mode’. However, I have shown that the SFL approach to
context is theoretically inadequate (Van Dijk, 2003).
One of the theoretical difficulties of a theory of context formulated in
terms of social situations is how to avoid having to introduce all properties
of such situation, and not only those that are relevant for the discourse. Also for this reason, there are
directions in discourse and conversation analysis that are reluctant to
introduce social context in the description of text or talk, especially if such
context is construed by the analyst, rather than explicitly oriented to by the
participants themselves (Schegloff, 1987, 1992a, 1997). A point of debate in
this case is what exactly counts as ‘being oriented to’, in the same way as the
more general notion of ‘relevance’ (see the debate between Schegloff, Wetherell
and Billig in Discourse & Society)
In recent work, I have repeatedly argued that an explicit theory of
context cannot and should not be accounted for only in terms of the properties
of the communicative or interactional situation (Van Dijk, 1999, 2001, 2003). Situations do not directly condition
discourse structures. Nor do discourse structures directly influence
situations, for that matter. If that would be so, all people in the same
situation would talk or write in the same way. Also, such a context theory
would be deterministic or probabilistic: some social event would in that case
(more or less probably) ‘cause’ specific discourse properties.
The situation-discourse relation is
necessarily indirect, and established by the participants. More
specifically, the interface is cognitive: It is the way participants understand and represent the social situation that influences discourse
structures. According to contemporary cognitive psychology, I assume that such
representations take the form of mental models, stored in episodic memory, as
is the case for all mental models of specific events and situations
(Johnson-Laird, 1983; Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; Van Oostendorp &
Goldman, 1999). Mental models represent what we informally call ‘experiences’,
and communicative events in which we participate are just one type of everyday
experience. Since mental models have theoretically and experimentally been shown
to be crucial in discourse production and understanding, these ‘context models’
are able to explain many of the relations between discourse and social
situations: they explain how participants orient to aspects of the current
communicative situation.
Context models account, first of all, for the notion of relevance: whatever is construed as part
of the context model is by definition relevant. Indeed, context models provide
an explicit theory of relevance. Secondly, context models are subjective – they depend on the previous
experiences, including previous discourses, of participants. They show how and
why some situational properties may be relevant for some participants, but less
so, or not at all, for other participants, or for the same participant at other
moments. Thirdly, mental models are ongoingly and strategically constructed and
modified, and hence account for the dynamic
nature of an ever changing context throughout text or talk. In this way,
context models flexibly control many aspects of discourse production and
understanding.
One of the issues, however, not yet accounted for in such a theory is the
‘scope’ of the context models. We have assumed that models subjectively
represent social situations. But this raises the problem of the definition of a
‘social situation’. If we limit such situations to typical everyday
conversations, interaction or other face-to-face encounters, we may define them
in terms of a setting of place and time, participants and their properties
(including identities, roles, relations, aims, knowledge, etc.) and their
actions. This is how much contextualization studies thus far have informally conceptualized
the situatedness of discourse (Auer & Di Luzio, 1992; Brown & Fraser,
1979; Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; see Van Dijk, 1999; for further references).
However, as soon as we take different types of text and talk, and especially
specialized, institutional or professional discourse, then we might want to
include some relevant aspect of the institution and its properties in the
model. That is, we may want to ‘situate’ medical discourse in a hospital,
educational discourse or conversations in schools or universities, and
political discourses in parliament, for instance (see, among many other
references, Drew & Heritage, 1992; Drew & Sorjonen, 1997; Sarangi &
Roberts, 1999; Thornborrow, 2002) . And when we include the social identities
of the participants, such as gender, race or class, then we have another
important category that requires to be included in a context model (Bucholtz,
Liang & Sutton, 1999; Davis, 1993; Fischer & Todd, 1988; Kotthoff &
Wodak, 1997; Van Dijk, 1984, 1987, 1991; 1993; Wodak, 1997). The same is true
for group relations, e.g., of power or competition (Corson, 1995; Fairclough,
1989; Wodak, 1989). Before we know it we are including as possibly ‘relevant’ a
host of other social conditions of communicative events – conditions that
demonstrably influence what people say and how they say it. In other words, we
would need to include much of the ‘variables’ that have been studied in
sociolinguistics for years.
However, in the same way as behaviorist and other older theories of
language did not want to study ‘meaning’ because this would imply a study of
the whole world, also such a theory of context involving all relevant micro and
macro properties of social situations, would soon mean a virtual explosion of
possibly relevant conditions, and hence an unmanageable context model.
Especially when we think of the broader social, political and cultural
conditions of discourse, the notion of context
of culture has been used, e.g., in the tradition of British empiricism as
it gave rise to systemic linguistics: Malinowski, Firth and Halliday (see,
e.g., Eggins, 1994). Such context of culture was usually distinguished from the
‘context of situation’, as described above. However, it is not so easy to
establish such a distinction. For instance, the social identity and institution
of the participants might be seen as situational or more broadly sociocultural.
Here we also touch upon the well-known but problematic distinction between micro and macro structures or levels of description in the social sciences
(Alexander, 1987; Huber, 1991; Knorr-Cetina & Cicourel, 1981).
It is my aim in this paper to theoretically account for the concept of this
more ‘global’ social, political or cultural context, how it differs from
situational context and how such a notion can be accounted for in terms of the
theory of context models. It obviously cannot be the aim of this paper to study
the myriad of societal influences on discourse, as they have been studied in a
wealth of literature. We only want to theoretically account for the fact that
such (indirect) influences are possible in the first place, namely through
context models.
Context Models
Context models are subjective representations of communicative situations.
As all other models, they are assumed to be stored in episodic memory, that is,
together with all our other personal experiences. Indeed, communicative events
are experiences like other events, and may be remembered or forgotten as such. In
other words, if our personal experiences are represented as episodic models,
context models are a special type of such models, namely those in which at
least one of the ongoing actions is discursive.
Context models strategically control discourse processing, in such a way
that a discourse is produced or understood that is appropriate in a given communicative situation. This means that
anything that can vary in discourse may thus become controlled by the context
model, such as deictic expressions, politeness formulas, style, rhetorical
structures, speech acts, and so on.
As suggested above, context models subjectively represent the properties
of the communicative situation that are relevant for each participant. This
means that if context models are not well coordinated, communication problems
and conflict may arise, for instance when the participants represent each other
in terms of identities or roles, or with aims and beliefs that are different
from those represented by the other. In most informal studies on context, thus,
we find various categories, such as Setting (Time, Place), Participants (and
their group identities, roles and relations), and Actions, since the contents
of these categories are usually relevant for discourse. These categories form a
more or less fixed schema that allows participants to analyze and represent a
potentially infinite number of social situations. Such an analysis needs to
take place in matters of seconds, given the fast changing situational
circumstances of language users. This means that context models need to be
relatively simple and not too big.
Cognitively speaking, language users cannot possibly handle vast and
complex situation models, if only because of the limitations of working memory
(or perhaps some form of intermediate control memory; see Kintsch, 1998).
During talk or text, they need to keep track of changes in the situation, and
when relevant represent them and thus update their context model, as they also
do with ‘semantic’ models of the events discourse refers to (Morrow, Bower
& Greenspan, 1989).
Whereas the identities and relationships of participants may be relatively
stable during interaction (although also negotiation of identities and relations
may take place; see, e.g., Firth, 1995), at least one contextual dimension is
constantly changing, so that context models need to be updated ongoingly: their
knowledge, if only on the basis of
the meanings or information (and their inferences) of the previous segments of
the current discourse.
Since context models need to be relatively simple in order to be able to
fit memory and in order to feed the information of the control processes of
discourse production and understanding, there is no obvious way that they can
also deal with vast amounts of social or cultural characteristics of the
current ‘global’ situation.
However, if on the other hand it is also true that speakers and their
discourses are traditionally said to be controlled by social structure or
culture, then we need to find out how such information may fit the context
model anyway.
In order to solve that theoretical dilemma, should we perhaps add or
integrate some kind of macro model
representing the relevant social or cultural structures to the ‘micro’ context
model postulated above? And if so, how can we do so within the space and
process limitations of controlling context models? Secondly, whereas we may
have relatively simple schematic representations of situations, no obvious
representation format seems to be available for the social and cultural (macro)
structures that form the environment of interaction and communication: indeed,
how to represent institutions, groups, power relations, and so on, in a few
categories? And thirdly, if we need to select the relevant aspects of such social and cultural environments, how are
language users able to do such a ‘social’ analysis of situations, and do this
in real time, that is, immediately previous to, or during text or talk? Thus, if professors and students interact, how
and how much knowledge do they need to activate about their mutual identities,
roles and relations; how much about universities, teaching and learning; how
much about their mutual age groups, and so on? The same is true for all other
text and talk, e.g., in families, on the job, or in service encounters, among
many other settings and genres. Moreover, each culture has different norms and
rules of interaction, such as norms of politeness, which would need special
cultural conditions of speech acts, text or talk. Again, the number and variety
of such potentially relevant social and cultural conditions is vast – and they
add to the properties of situations (participants, etc.) mentioned above.
Obviously, in order to accommodate even the potentially relevant properties of
‘global’ situations, we need a device that is able to do so within the
constraints of realistic mental models of human participants of communication.
Macro Context Models
In order to answer the various questions above let us speculate a moment
on ‘macro’ context models. At the moment it does not matter whether these are
separate macro models, or whether ‘macro information’ is simply part of the
context model as defined above. However, whatever our ideas on the ways
participants bring to bear their ‘understanding’ of society and culture in
their interaction and discourse, the format must be compatible with the usual
memory and other constraints of discourse processing. That is, whatever
sociocultural information is discursively relevant, it must be organized in a
relatively simple way, or must be easily retrievable. So let us construct macro
models theoretically and see where they lead us as feasible control structures
for discourse.
Macro categories
We have assumed that any kind of macro model is manageable only if it has a
relatively simple structure -- just like situational context (micro) models --
and if such a structure consists of a schematically organized categories. What
are these categories? One theoretical heuristic to find these categories is by
comparison to the structure of situations, but instead of the micro categories
(setting, participants) we now use the corresponding macro-categories, e.g., as
follows:
Micro Macro
Setting Macro
Setting
interaction time period (days, months years)
location space
(city, country)
Participants: persons Participants:
groups, institutions, organizations
Identities:
professor Identities,
e.g., ethnic group, school
Roles:
teach Roles,
e.g., education
Relations:
personal power Relations,
e.g., institutional power
Aims Group
goals
Personal knowledge Group – social
knowledge
Action,
e.g., explain Macro
act of group, institution: educate, etc.
Let us examine these potential ‘macro’ categories, in some more detail. Thus,
by way of example, let us imagine first the (macro) context model of a
journalist writing a news report for the press. She first of all represents the
current Setting, as here and now, the place of writing; with herself in her
roles of, e.g., writer, journalist, correspondent of newspaper X, with the aim
to write a news report, based on her professional knowledge about an
assassination. Now, what kind of macro-information about the social environment
does she need in order to be able to write an appropriate news report on such a
topic?
Macro Setting
Obviously, first of all, the Setting information available to her is not
limited to the here and now of her writing, at home or in the office. She most
likely also ‘knows’ what city and country she is writing in, as well as the
date and the year. She may not have such knowledge activated and present in
working memory at all moments, but it is ‘situational’ knowledge that is
immediately accessible when needed, for instance in some kind of control memory
(Kintsch, 1998). Indeed, she may need to signal such information in the
dateline of the news article, as well as when using deictic expressions such as
‘this year’, ‘last month’, or ‘in this city’, and so on, for instance when
comparing to other assassinations that have taken place in this city or country
and during this year. News discourse, as well as many other discourse genres,
make extensive use of reference to the places and periods of events, and these
also require contextualization with respect to the place and time frame of the
speaker or writer. Such ‘settings’ are not merely ‘local’ (here and now), but
also more ‘global’ (this city or country; this week or this year).
Context model information is not limited to discursive situations, but
more generally derives from the ongoing ‘experience models’ people construct
and update each moment during the day (Van Dijk, 1999). Thus, often the
knowledge about day, month and year, as well as about city or country, among
other ‘global’ Setting properties, people are already aware of before engaging in verbal interaction. As
is the case for other macro context information, such information may be
cognitively backgrounded, and only be (re)activated when it becomes relevant,
for instance when setting information is referred to or presupposed in the
discourse.
Some of this global information may be more accessible than other
information: We usually have direct access to the information about the city or
country we are in (except in the humoristic situation of
From professionals writing ‘dated’ texts such as news reports, however, it
may be expected they do have such information readily available during their
work. The point is only to show that in many genres and types of interaction,
participants use a model in which at least some global setting information is
represented. Such information may even extend to such large periods as for
instance the current period of the ‘present’ or ‘postmodernity’, when writing
about such a period, or when writing about the ‘past’.
The same is true for location information – for instance when speaking or
writing from another continent, and referring to ‘here in Europe’ or ‘here in
Macro participants
The same journalist from the previous example represents herself as the
current writer of the current news report, as a journalist and maybe as a
correspondent of a specific newspaper. Similarly, she represents the editors
and readers of the newspaper as probable recipients. In both cases, her news
report will probably feature expressions that signal such (micro) contextual
information, such as a byline with her name, possibly with a description of her
function (Correspondent in X, etc.). Reference to the readers in news is less
common (but more common in editorials directly addressing the readers), but is
standard in many other discourse genres, such as didactic texts addressing
students, advertisements addressing clients or buyers, and of course in most
forms of conversation.
The question is whether context models of participants also may or must feature
information about macro ‘participants’, such as groups, institutions,
organizations or nation states, or whether these are typical analyst’s
constructs that are (often) irrelevant for the description of text or talk, as
long as participants do not explicitly orient towards them (Schegloff, 1992b). In
our example of the journalist, this is obviously the case: She knows for what
newspaper she is writing, and will write her news report accordingly – she’ll
tell a story in a very different way as when she tells the ‘same’ story to her
friends or as a witness in court. Also, apart from the current communication
medium’s self-description, such as the name of the newspaper on the cover page
and possibly on other pages, the news report itself may self-refer to the
newspaper as a participant or a writer, e.g., when a journalist writes
something like “The witness told The Newspaper….”,
where ‘The Newspaper’, is a metonymy
referring to the journalist of The Newspaper.
Similarly, readers in their context models usually do not represent such
and such a reporter as author of the current news reports – even when a news report
is signed – but represent the author or source as the ‘newspaper’ or as ‘The Newspaper’. Reactivation of the
context model in later accounts will typically lead to accounts such as “I read
in The Newspaper…”.
Similarly, a journalist on the other hand does not have individual readers
in mind, but probably a collectivity of readers of the newspaper. She will
adapt the discourse to that collective, such as probable average knowledge
about previous events (old models) and probable general, sociocultural
knowledge (for these strategies of knowledge management, see Van Dijk, 2005).
That is, the journalist writes primarily as a member of an organization (the
newspaper) and a member of a profession (the journalists), and is able to do so
only when representations of such collectivities are present as macro
information in her context model.
The same is true for much organizational or institutional discourse, and
this may be variously displayed in explicit collective authorship and
corresponding deictic expressions (e.g., the editorials of the British tabloid The Sun are labeled “The Sun Says…”).
Such macro representations of agency in context models not only feature identity,
but also information about roles and relationships for collective agents. Thus,
the newspaper may discursively self-represent itself as opponent of the
government or as critic of industrial environmental practices, as would
typically be the case in editorials. This means that the writer of such an
editorial also must construct a mental model in which such roles and identities
for macro agents are represented as such.
Knowledge
Besides the social properties of collective agents, they also may be
assigned cognitive properties, such as aims, beliefs, knowledge, attitudes and
ideologies. Such shared beliefs will be multiply signaled in organizational or
institutional discourse, as is the case in newspaper editorials, reports of
NGOs, parliamentary decisions, or government discourse, among many other
collective discourses.
As suggested before, prominent and important in context models is the role
of knowledge, organized by a special
K-device that strategically projects what recipients already know or what is
still unknown to them, thus regulating the presuppositional structure of the
discourse (Van Dijk, 2003, 2005). Knowledge is by definition certified shared
belief, and hence as such characteristic of groups and communities. If
journalists express or leave implicit some information that is presupposed to
be known to the readers, they do so because they assume that ‘the readers’ as a
collective already have this information.
Even if such knowledge presuppositions are regulated by the context models
of actual writers-reporters, they are at the same time the shared knowledge of
the newspaper as an institution or organization. In legal conflicts, it may be
the newspaper, and not the individual journalist who may be prosecuted for
publishing secrets or for slander. Journalists are explicitly trained to take
into account these and other shared, collective or institutional
responsibilities, as is the case for civil servants, business managers and many
other professionals working for companies or institutions.
As required by the theory of contextual relevance, such macro model
information must be signaled in discourse. This is indeed the case, as we may
see in the epistemic structure of assertions-presuppositions in news reports,
in which case ‘old information’ that might have been forgotten by ‘the readers’
may be reminded by such expressions as ‘as we reported last week’, or more
explicitly as ‘as The Newspaper
reported last week’, a previous report that might have been written by another
journalist.
In everyday conversation, presupposition of previously communicated
knowledge is part of personal context models: ‘I remember what I told you
before, and now I remind you of that earlier conversation.’ In collective
discourse, such a personal model need to feature also a macro level in which it
is not merely the (current or old) context models of the individual journalists
are at stake, but also the context models of the organization: journalists need
to know and remember what the organization has ‘said’ before.
Macro Action
Although context models are undoubtedly more complex than summarized here,
let us finally assume that one of their macro categories is about global
actions. This category applies both to personal as well as to collective
discourses. Thus, a professor may now self-represent her current act as
‘explaining a problem to the students’, or as ‘helping students’, but such an
act will be part of the meso-level act of teaching a class or having a
tutorial, which in turn may be part of the macro-level act of teaching,
educating, and so on.
My contention is not that at each moment during the performance of base-level
acts in interaction speakers are aware of these higher level acts, but that
such may be the case as soon as aims, problems, conflicts or complications need
to be formulated, expressed or discussed. That is, lower level acts will
usually be represented as functional at other levels, and even during lower
level acts agents may have more or less cognitively backgrounded consciousness
of at least some higher level acts providing functional ‘reasons’ for what they
are now doing. That is, the way I
explain a problem to students is probably different from the way I explain a
problem to friends, to the police or to my kids. That is, local acts are functionally
variable within larger activities or social practices.
Such differences should also show up in text and talk. This is not only
because of the representation of different participants as part of the context
model, but also because of the higher level action representation in such
models. Thus a current explanation to students will have a didactic style
because of the overall representation of teaching. And a speech of a politician
is necessarily adapted to the overall category of a ‘parliamentary debate’, and
even more globally to the macro act of ‘legislation’ – and locally multiply
signaled as such (Bayley, 2004).
The same is true not only for the macro acts of individual actors, but
again also for the macro acts of collectivities, institutions or organizations,
as we have seen for the example of newspaper news reports and editorials above.
It is the newspaper that is ‘reporting’, ‘publishing’ or ‘attacking the
government’. In each news report and editorial journalists knows that through
this text they are accomplishing one of the macro acts of the organization, and
such contextual knowledge is also discursively displayed by the action
descriptions of media discourse (‘Yesterday we reported…’; ‘The Newspaper has always supported the
ideas of party X, but…’, etc.).
Micro and macro
For a number of reasons I have modeled participant knowledge about social
macro situations after the usual model of micro situations. This is not merely
a useful heuristic device, but also might function as a feature of cognitive
economy: the same conceptual, categorical structure is being used to represent
local as well as global information. This is not a farfetched assumption,
because such is also the case for other cognitive areas: agents may be personal
or collectives or institutional, as is the case for actions, times and places,
which are also discursively coded in the same way whether they are local or
whether they are global.
This suggests that people probably do not have two different models, a
micro and a macro model, of the same structure, but in fact one model with the categories mentioned above, but with
information at various levels of specificity or generality as contents of the
categories. Depending on the current situation, language users may foreground
or background the global level information. They will typically foreground
global information when locally it is necessary to explain, account for,
motivate or resolve problems of local activities, e.g., in the following
simulated account: ‘I report this event because it shows that this minister is
incompetent, and it is the task of this newspaper to act as a watchdog of
elected politicians.’
This level-dependent processing of situational information is not limited
to contexts, but also well-known in discourse processing itself: language users
are able to express and understand meaning at various levels between micro and
macro structures (Van Dijk, 1980). This allows them especially to assign global
coherence (and hence reduce complexity) to complex sequences of propositions.
The same function may be assigned to global context representations – they
allow many ‘local’ settings, participants, actions, etc. to be subsumed under
higher level, more abstract ones. Thus, whatever we do in the classroom, it may
usually be subsumed as ‘teaching’. Whatever journalists do, their actions may
be subsumed as, for instance, ‘reporting’. That is, instead of complicating
contexts, global level categories may actually reduce the complexity of
contexts, especially for complex sequences of action and interaction, as is the
case for meetings, parliamentary debates, and so on.
The implications of this theory of macro context control are quite
interesting. In the first place, we do not need to introduce new theoretical
units, levels or schemas: Micro-macro processing takes place at all levels of
discourse, interaction and information processing. People not only understand
and plan complex discourse at global levels of meaning and form, and thus
produce topics and themes, or schemas, that control local production and
understanding. We now find that they do the same for the environment in which
they act and speak: They need to reduce the vast complexity of such
environments, and do so in the same way as when reading a news report or a
novel: they use general categories of a schema and then represent local
information at higher, macro-levels. In a way, thus, they ‘summarize’ the
social environment at the macro levels of their context models. It is in this
way that they are able to control the local situation variables and their
information, and control discourse at the same time at the micro and macro
levels, as explained above. Thus reduced, situational information may well fit
the constraints of context models, as is also the case for the semantic
macrostructures of discourse that are needed to produce or understand globally
coherent discourse. Macro level
information in context models in the same way control both the local and the
global appropriateness of discourse.
Other social information?
The modeling of macro contexts on the basis of micro contexts and their de
facto inclusion as higher level information in the categories of the context
schema, might have blinded us for the fact that we might be overlooking a large
amount of other relevant ‘social’ information that should also be represented
in context models. Thus, journalists may self-represent themselves as such, as
well as the newspaper as an institutional agent, and show such categorization
in discourse. But what about all they know about journalists, newspapers,
readers, and reporting – a vast knowledge base that they share with other
professionals. Thus, if a journalists writes ‘In our last edition of yesterday,
we reported that..’, does that mean that the knowledge about newspapers having
different editions must be fed to the context model so as to be able to
describe and explain the specific deictic expression ‘in our last edition’? The
same is true for all journalists know about sources, press releases, interviewing,
newsbeats, deadlines, editorial supervision and constraints, and so on (Gans,
1979; Tuchman, 1978).
These are all possible elements of news production, part of the
professional knowledge journalists. It might be shown that much of such
knowledge is relevant in news writing, for instance when citing people, using
quotation marks and in general in the well-known news strategies of reporting
discourse. Does this mean that all such knowledge is to be included in context
models? If so, this would blow up the notion of context model to cognitively unmanageable
proportions.
At the moment, we have no elegant solution to this problem. We need to
recognize the cognitive constraint of quite limited, relatively simple context
models as control mechanisms of discourse production and understanding. However,
as soon as we reflect on the many conditions of discourse production,
especially in professional or institutional situations, then we might not have
enough when representing Setting, Participants, Cognition and Action as context
schema categories. We have already seen that in each category we may have
different levels of more or less local (micro) or global (macro) concepts. Now,
we see that for each of these concepts (e.g., journalist, professor; newspaper,
university, etc) we might need a vast amount of further information in order to
account for the specificities of discourse production, e.g., about types of
location and time periods (including all of history), types of agents and
institutions and their relevant properties (e.g., that newspapers as
organizations publish newspapers as medium) and actions.
In order to avoid cognitive overload of the context model, I shall assume
that the schematic categories as proposed are filled with ‘summarizing’
information about the social situation (journalist, newspaper, etc), but that
such contents are of course linked with the professional knowledge structures
of participants. That is, when needed, journalists may activate and apply their
professional knowledge about interviewing or editorial meetings. They do so, of
course, during interviewing and during such meetings, as part of the overall
institutional action of ‘reporting the news’. But when writing the news report,
journalists need not have activated all knowledge about interviewing, and may
simply represent the now most
relevant information, namely what some source has said.
In other words, context models are also acting as the interface between
discourse and knowledge. They not only regulate the knowledge needed to write
about what the article is about (say
In sum, we should leave context models as simple as possible, with a
handful (7 plus or minus 2) of categories which themselves may each feature a
handful (7 plus or minus 2) summarizing information units describing current
Setting (time, location), participants, cognitions and actions, both at the
local as well as the global level. Local level information is always active
because it needs to control all current discourse structures, and global level
information may be more or less backgrounded and activated when needed at
certain (explanatory, meta, etc) moments in discourse production.
The same is obviously true for the context models of recipients, which
also may represent the communicative event at various levels of specificity and
generality.
So far my argument was limited to the levels of various societal structures.
However, macro contexts may be more far-reaching, and include general cultural
information. The vast literature on intercultural communication and its
possible conflicts seems to suggest that when context models are not culturally
matched, communication problems may arise. This is a priori true for the
specific cultural knowledge needed to produce and understand discourse, and
which is a basis of all processing and interaction.
However, it may not only be true for our ‘knowledge of the world’, but also
for our knowledge about communication and interaction and their norms and
rules. That is, we may ill understand meanings of discourse in other cultures,
but at the same time ignore many rules of interaction, such as those of
politeness, turn taking or interruption, conversational postulates, genres or
taboo topics, among a host of other communicative knowledge of other cultures
(among hundred of other books on cross-cultural communication, see, e.g., Di
Luzio, Günthner, & Orletti, 2001; Gudykunst, 2003).
Many of these properties can be represented in the categories postulated
above. For instance in the category of Participants we may represent various
identities, roles and relations between participants. Thus, we may and often
should represent relationships of power and hierarchy, and with such general
information contextual rules may constrain discourse in various ways: who
speaks first, in what style, who controls topics, and so on.
The point is rather whether in different cultures we might have different
basic categories in context models. Thus, whereas ‘we’ (in western and other
cultures) might assume that communicative situations are ‘peopled’ by human
participants, one could easily imagine that in some other cultures special
categories might be needed to represent gods or other metaphysical participants
or magic objects – and locations may need to be divided between everyday and
sacred, and so on.
We may assume however that the basic principles are the same – namely that
the context is schematic and relatively simple, and that its categories and
their local and global contents control the variable structures discourse, both
locally and globally.
It is an empirical matter to find out for each culture which are these
basic categories, whether there are ‘universal’ categories, and how such
contextual categories control which structures of text and talk – as when a
power relation between participants controls the choice of personal pronouns,
or when the knowledge of the speaker about the knowledge of the recipient
controls the presupposition structure of the discourse.
Concluding remark
From our theoretical discussion and from the brief and tentative list of
some macro categories of context models, we may provisionally conclude that
context models may also feature higher level situational information, for
instance in terms of location, period, collective agents and their properties
and actions. Such an account is not merely a familiar but problematic social
distinction between micro and macro level description. Rather, we thus
theoretically account for the bridging problem that has haunted social
scientists since decades. That is, the relation between micro and macro is not
just a question of levels of sociological description, and not just a question of
conceptual inclusion (A is member of group B; action C is an instantiation of
global action D; etc.), but rather how
micro and macro can be explicitly related, namely through the representations
of social members, for instance as context models.
This also implies that the level distinctions and the higher level
categorizations are not merely the products of analysts, but genuine members’
categories and devices. Thus, journalists writing a news report are aware that
they are producing the text of an organization, that they express shared
professional knowledge of the organization, that they are writing for a
collectivity of readers, and that they are at the same time realizing, locally,
the global personal acts of working for a newspaper, and the global institutional
acts of informing the public or criticizing the government. These are not
merely analytical macro categories; these aspects of context models also
locally control discourse production and understanding: the global categories
are relevant for a large number of discourse properties. Indeed, people may
explicitly self-describe such higher level categories, for instance in
meta-commentary, e.g., when professors tell the students why they explain X or
why students need to know X, for instance in terms of educational and learning
goals.
Cognitively, the global categories may be less available than the local
categories, but they need to be activated in order to be used at any moment as
soon as representations of context categories of setting, participants,
cognitions and actions are relevant at various levels. Such a
foreground-background distinction is a quite general property of processing and
memory.
Future work on macro context models needs to further develop the schematic
categories needed to account for global situational understanding in different
cultures. Comparative discourse studies will be needed to see whether not only
the contents but also the very categories are different cultures. Another task
will be to spell out the actual cognitive strategies involved in the production
and management of context models and the activation and deactivation of global
context information. Finally, as discourse analysts our main task is to show
how exactly macro contexts influence the structures of text and talk.
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