прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Ideology

Discourse enables social actors to formulate general conclusions based on several experiences and observations. It is able to describe past and future events, it is able to describe and prescribe, and may describe actions and beliefs at any level of specificity and generality. And for us, most interestingly, discourse not only exhibits ideologies indirectly, as other social practices may do too, but also explicitly formulates ideological beliefs directly.

Thus, in many situations of intraand inter-group text and talk, social members are able to tell or remind others or novices about the ideological beliefs shared by the group. Ideological socialization, therefore, largely takes place through discourse. In interactional confrontations with members of other groups, people are similarly able to discursively explain, defend or legitimate their ideologies. In other words, discourse allows direct and explicit expression of ideologies, but the crucial function of such (usually generic, general) expressions is in their social consequences, namely, the acquisition, change or confirmation of social beliefs. 4

In this and the next chapters, I shall describe some of the dimensions of the relations between discourse and ideology. This investigation is merely illustrative — many volumes can be written about the many ways ideologies are expressed in text and talk My approach here is primarily conceptual and theoretical. I want to know, more generally, how discourse expresses or reproduces underlying ideologies, and not study specific ideologies or specific language or discourse structures (such as topics, pronouns or metaphors). In a later study I hope to focus in more detall on the role of discourse structures in the reproduction of ideologies.

The concept of discourse

In order to understand how ideology relates to discourse, let me first summarize my discourse theoretical framework, especially sine this is somewhat different from others that study both discourse and ideology, such as the more philosophical approach by Foucault. 5 As indicated before, my approach is essentially multidisciplinary, and combines an analysis of linguistic, cognitive, social and cultural aspects of text and talk in context, and does so from a critical, socio-political perspective. b

The concept of discourse used here is just as general, and hence as fuzzy, as that of language, cotnmunication, society or, indeed, that of ideology. Although its 'definitioñ is the task of the whole discipline of discourse studies, a few remarks are in order about my use of the term'cliscoursé in Chis study. This is also necessary because in many current studies of ideology and its relations to discourse, other (sometimes confusing) discourse concepts are used. 7

Communicative events versus verbal products

The primary meaning of the terco 'discourse' as it is used here, and as it is now generally used in more socially oriented discourse analysis, is that of a

complex, and at least involves a number of social actors, typically in speaker/writer and hearer/reader roles (but also in other roles, such as observer or overhearer), taking part in a communicative act, in a specific setting (time, place, circumstances) and based on other context features. This communicative act may be written or spoken, and, especially in spoken interaction, usually combines verbal and non-verbal dimensions (gestures, face-work, etc.). Typical examples are an everyday conversation with friends during dinner, a dialogue between doctor and patient, or writing/ reading a news report in the newspaper. We may call this the extended primary meaning of the term 'discourse'.

In the everyday practice of discourse studies, however, we often also use a more restricted primary meaning of 'discourse.' In that case, we abstract the verbal dimension of the spoken or written communicative act of a communicative event, and usually refer to this abstraction as talk or text. That is, in this sense 'discoursé is rather being used to refer to the accomplished or ongoing 'product' of the communicative act, namely, its written or auditory result as it is made socially available for recipients to interpret. 'Discourse' in that case is the general term that refers to a spoken or a written verbal product of the communicative act.

In earlier text linguistics, and still among some discourse linguists, a related distinction is made, between 'discourse' and 'text'. Here 'discourse' is used to refer to the actual, socially displayed text or talk, and 'text' to its abstract (e.g. grammatical) structures. This distinction implements for discourse analysis the well-known distinctions between langue and parole or between competence and performance in structural and generative linguistics. 'Discourse' is then a unit of language use or performance (parole), and 'text' an abstract theoretical unit (like a noun phrase, clause or sentence) that belongs to the realm of abstract linguistic knowledge or competence or to the system of the language (langue). Although relevant, I no longer use this distinction. In contemporary, multidisciphinary discourse analysis it has become either too confusing or obsolete — discourse studies now generally analyses discourses as forms of language use. Such a focus on concrete, ongoing language use does not mean that the theoretical account itself is less abstract. In the same way as linguists abstract grammatical properties from actual verbal utterances, discourse analysts do so when they describe, for example, gestures, intonation, pauses, repairs, graphical design, narrative structures, metaphors, turns, closing sequences, and so on.

Tokens versus types

Whether in its extended or restricted meaning, namely, as talk/text or as complex communicative event, 'discourse' in this primary meaning is used to refer to particular objects or tokens, that is, to unique occurrences involving particular social actors in a particular setting and context. This uniqueness is for instance defined in terms of the unique combination of

by these participants. To mark this specific use of the notion of 'discourse', we use indefinite or definite anides or demonstratives: we speak about 'a discourse', 'the discourse' or 'that discourse'. That is, 'discourse' is a count noun here.

In the age of printing, xeroxing and computer files, copies may be made of the spoken or written expression of such a unique discourse, for instance on tape or in a book or newspaper. But even then we say that these are copies of (the expression of) the 'same' discourse.

As elsewhere, there are the usual delimitation problems: Where does one discourse end and the next one begin, for instance in a sequence of conversations, or in a collection of printed texts, for instance in a newspaper, book or encyclopedia? Are the different instalments of an anide, a TV film, or a daily story, one or more discourses, even when they are physically noncontiguous in time or place? There are many examples where there is an ambiguity between such discontinuous instalments of the 'same' text or talk, on the one hand, and sets of 'intertextually' related discourses, on the other hand. Indeed, whereas a continuous spoken dialogue is usually considered as representing one discourse, a written dialogue or debate is rather seen as an intertextually related sequence of texts, even when it may be called 'one' debate in both cases.

This is not the place, however, to solve such well-known problems of delimitation and definition. To simplify matters, I simply follow commonsense practices here, and speak about one dialogue when it is continuous in time (not in space, because participants may talk to each other over the phone), has the same participants, and has a marked beginning and end. And for written texts we assume that they have the same writer(s), have marked beginning and end, and usually, though not always, that they are physically continuous (exceptions are, indeed, several instalments of the 'same text' appearing at different times, or separate parts of the same time appearing in different locations of the same medium (e.g. a front page story in the press, continuing on an inside page). Both for spoken and for written discourse, we usually further require that they are globally coherent, that is, that they form a meaning unit, and not only a physical unit of continuous expression. But this requirement is itself problematical for everyday conversations that are characterized by several unrelated topics, or for instance literary texts, like poems, that do not seem to have an obviously unitary, global meaning.

These problems and examples also show that 'discourse' is a highly complex and ambiguous notion, and that as soon as we really want to give a 'clefinitioñ we already need to start making all kinds of analytical distinctions, use other concepts, and indeed start to theorize about discourse. Hence it is usually a rather pointless exercise to give exact definitions. As suggested aboye, thus, discourse is as general and therefore as vague a notion as 'languagé , 'society' or 'culturé .

Besides the specific (extended or restricted) notion of'cliscoursé, there is also a more abstract concept. Instead of specific, unique tokens, we may also

use 'discourse' to refer to abstract types. Thus, instead of referring to this particularconversation, story or news report, we may also use the notion of discourse in order to designate conversations, stories or news reports in general. When we make theoretical, that is, general, assertions about discourse, they are of course about types, not about tokens. We may say that 'a' or 'the' news report or story consists of a number of conventional categories, such as an initial summary (e.g. a headline and a lead) or a concluding coda. That is, in this case we characterize a potentially infinite set of real or possible tokens that satisfy such properties. This abstract notion of discourse may similarly be restricted as well as extended. We may refer to a dialogue as the verbal result of a communicative event, or to the whole communicative event. In this chapter, we only talk about discourse and its properties in general, not about particular instances or tokens of text or talk as we would do when analysing concrete examples.

Text and talk of social domains

To make things even more complicated, there are at least two other main meanings of the concept of discourse. First, closely related to the notion of discourse referring to an abstract type, the concept may be used to refer to specific genres, mostly in combination with an adjective denoting a genre or social domain, as in political discourse, medical discourse and academic discourse. In this case, the notion of discourse is also general and abstract, but selects a specific set of (abstract) discourses or genres. Thus, political discourse may be the overall designation for all discourse genres that are used in the realm of politics, or the discourses used by politicians, and so on. In this sense, 'cliscoursé is not simply a specific genre (like a parliamentary debate or a propaganda leaflet), but rather a socially constituted set of such genres, associated with a social domain or field.

Finally, we may distinguish an even more abstract and higher-level notion of discourse. Instead of referring to afi the text and talk, or the discourses of a specific period, community or a whole culture, we may also use the very abstract and generic notion of the 'discourse' of that period, community or culture — including all possible discourse genres and all domains of communication. Other notions sometimes used here are discourseformation or and order of discourse, following sociological uses of the terms'social formatioñ and 'social order', respectively. Depending on oné s theory of discourse and society, also this highly abstract notion of discourse may be restricted (all text and talk) or extended (all communicative events, including language users, contexts, etc.). It is this last, very abstract and general notion of discourse that is often related to the equally general, abstract, social and shared notion of ideology. Indeed, this notion of discourse is sometimes even collapsed with that of ideology, a practice of reduction that I rejected as theoretically, empirically and analytically misguided.

LI

Confusion here is even worse when this broad, philosophical concept of discourse also includes the ideas and ideologies of a specific period or social domain. As is of course often the case, the most general and ill-defined concepts may sometimes become most popular. After all, in cultural fads and fashions, ambiguity, myth and vagueness are often more attractive than conceptual precision. This is currently also the case for manr postmodem uses of 'discourse' in the humanities and the social sciences.

Whatever the ambiguities and fuzziness of the various notions of discourse introduced aboye, most share verbal (and related other semiotic) properties. That is, I do not use the word 'discourse' (or 'text' for that matter) for social structurés, interactions or communicative events that do not have (also) a verbal character. Thus, societies, (sub)cultures or social practices will not be described as discourses or texts here, even when they may need understanding or interpretation, or when they are routinely 'accomplished' much like discourses.

Other semiotic 'discourses'

Finally, another well-known case comprises 'messages' in other semiotic codes, such as (sequences of) images, movies, a dance and so on, especially when these also have a verbal dimension. 9 I shall, however, limit myself to commonsense notions here, and again only use the restricted notion of

referring to a whole communicative event, may well also feature other (visual, gestural) dimensions of communication and interaction, sometimes closely intertwined with the verbal aspect, as is the case in spoken movies and advertising. The only problem is that there is no everyday word to refer in general terms to either integrated (verbal/non-verbal) 'discourses', or to exclusively non-verbal semiotic 'messages', except by their specific words, such as 'picture', 'photo', 'movié or 'advertisement'.

I do not use the semiotic terms 'signs' (or indeed 'signifier' or 'signified') here. For discourse analysis these have generally become obsolete after more than thirty years of increasingly sophisticated linguistics and discourse studies. These notions were useful in early semiotics in order to describe, in the tercos of early structural linguistics, some properties of non-linguistic semiotic codes or objects, such as stories, movies, non-verbal sign systems, or other cultural artefacts. Moreover, the notion of 'sign', following early structuralism, is mostly used to denote minimal meaning units (like words), and not maximal meaning units like whole discourses or movies.

Where necessary, I shall simply speak of non-verbal discourses, or use specific genre designations. As is the case for other, more sophisticated disciplines (such as linguistic, logic or communication studies), it is hardly relevant to keep using traditional semiotic terminology to describe discourse structures. However, as long as the study of other semiotic practices does not have its own theoretical terminology, the integrated description of verbal and

non-verbal 'messages' may still make use of such semiotic terminology. This is especially so if such semiotic descriptions go beyond the mere identification of isolated signs, signifiers or signifieds, and focus on more conWlex structures of expression (signifiers), meaning (signifieds) and use.

The study of discourse

Discourse studies, as it is understood in this book, is a cross-disciplinary fleld of research that has emerged, especially since the mid-1960s, in virtually all disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. Initially developed in linguistics, literary studies and anthropology, it soon also spread to sociology, psychology, communication research and other disciplines. In principie, discourse studies as a separare cross-discipline besides linguistics (or semiotics for that matter), would not have been necessary if linguistic theories had paid attention to the study of actually occurring text and taik in the first place. However, most hard-core linguistics focused on grammar and on isolated sentences, even if there are directions of research that may focus on the textual or interactional 'functions' of grammatical structures of sentences. Hence, together with such other cross-disciplines as socio-linguistics, pragmatics and the ethnography of speaking, discourse analysis focuses on the systematic account of the complex structures and strategies of text and taik as they are actually accomplished (produced, interpreted, used) in their social contexts.

As suggested aboye, such a brief characterization of what I understand by 'discourse studies' (or the less adequate, but better-known term 'discourse analysis') is relevant in order to distinguish Chis field from (some) more impressionistic studies of discourse, especially in philosophy and literary studies. Discourse studies of course focuses on the broad social and cultural functions, conditions and consequences of text and taik, including, in our case here, the role of discourse in the study of ideology. However, more specifically, discourse and conversation analysis will typically always also focus on systematic, detailed and theory-based analyses of actually occurring structures of text and taik. Thus, a mere paraphrase or summarization of the 'content' of discourse, as also language users often do on the basis of their knowledge of discourse, is usually found not to be a form of discourse analysis in the sense intended here.

In its thirty years of existence, discourse studies has developed into a quite sophisticated discipline, and it would be no serious contribution to our insight into discourse (or ideology) if we were to simply ignore the many advances in the many ateas of this new discipline.

However, given the ambiguity of the term 'discourse', we may expect the same for 'discourse analysis', and there are therefore many directions and approaches of research, and many fields of inquiry. Besides linguistic (grammatical) studies of discourse, thus, we may find pragmatic studies of

(speech) acts, conversation analysis, stylistics, rhetoric, or the sociolinguistic study of discourse variation in its social context. Most of these studies focus on the various structures or strategies of text and talk, to be discussed in the next chapter. However, also the psychology of discourse production and understanding should be included in a broad, multidisciplinary discipline of discourse. The same is true for the study of microsocial dimensions of interaction and contexts, in which relations between discourse structures and, for example, properties of participants are being theorized.

In other words, the field of discourse studies as a discipline obviously follows the study of text and talk in the various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, and now also includes social psychology, communication research, political science and history. Ideally, an integrated study integrates the analysis of discourse structures per se with the account of their cognitive, social, political, historical and cultural functions and contexts. It is in this broad, integrated and multidisciplinary approach that I locate the study of the discursive expression and reproduction of ideologies.

21

Discourse Structures

On levels, structures and strategies

Typical for a discourse analytical approach to ideologies and their reproduction is that ideologies are not símply related to undifferentiated forms of text or talk, but mapped on to different levels and dimensions of discourse, each with its own structures or strategies. These various properties of discourse are the result of theoretical analyses and therefore may vary widely in different approaches.

Thus, conversation analysts exclusively focus on spontaneous, everyday dialogues, linguists on the grammatical structures of discourse, whereas pragmatics focuses on more speciflc properties of action and interaction, such as speech acts, illocutionary force or politeness strategies. Whereas earlier 'text linguistics' in practice tended to study mostly written texts, most other contemporary approaches, especially in the social sciences, have a preference for the analysis of spoken discourse, sometimes with the implicit assumption that 'natural' language use is essentially oral and interactive. Psychology on the other hand favours the study of (written) text comprehension, probably also because this is easier for experimentation in the laboratory.

It needs little argument, however, that both spoken and written/printed forros of discourse are the object of discourse studies, and that diere is no more or less 'natural' priority here, at least not for all cultures that have writing systems. Any approach that uniquely associates ideologies or social representations with the interactive, face-to-face social construction of 'meanings' is therefore by definition incomplete: ideologies are also expressed and reproduced by written text. Indeed, when it comes to the mass-mediated reproduction of ideologies in contemporary society, face-to- face interaction may even play a less prominent role than textual or onesided spoken/visual communication by newspapers and television.

From the sprawling cross-discipline of discourse studies that has emerged from anthropology, sociology, linguistics, psychology and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, we may hardly expect anything else but a large variety of approaches, theories, methods and their underlying philosophies. In order to give some background to the chapters that follow, let us briefly summarize some of the main structures usually studied in discourse analysis. At the same time, I give a brief indication of the ways ideologies may impinge on such structures during their communicative

manifestations. Note, though, that these indications are merely illustrations. A proper discourse analysis of ideological expressions of course would involve a much more detailed and systematic account of relevant structures and strategies.

Graphics

Neglected in virtually all approaches of discourse studies, and obviously irrelevant for the study of spoken dialogue, graphical structures of written or printed text are literally a prominent, while actually visible, property of discourse. Apart from some semiotic work on images or textual graphics, theory-formation in this field is still scarce, and analyses hardly go beyond impressionism. Yet, litde theory is necessary to understand that variations of graphical prominence may constitute a crucial element in the expression of ideologies. Whether a news report appears on the front page or on an inside page of the newspaper, high on the page or at the bottom, left or right, or whether it has a small or a banner headline, is long, short or broad, that is, printed over several columns, with or without a photograph, tables, drawings, colour and so on, are all properties of the graphical representation of just one genre that may have a serious impact on the readers' interpretation of the relevance or newsworthiness of news events. Many advertisements are inherently associated with images, colours and other graphical elements, and sometimes lack verbal text altogether. The visual element of TV programmes is crucial, and also includes special discourse graphics. Modem textbooks have a graphical layout that is assumed to raise and keep the interest of children and adolescente. And so on for a large variety of other written or printed genres.'

Graphical structures may have several cognitive, social and ideological functions. Cognitively, they control attention and interest during comprehension, and indicate what information is important or interesting, or should be focused on for other reasons, and may therefore be better understood and memorized. They may signal communication forms and genres, such as the difference between a news report and an editorial in the press, or between theory and assignments in a textbook. Socially, graphical structures, including photographs, have a large domain of associations, for instance with groups, organizations and subcultural styles, as the difference between a popular tabloid and a serious mainstream broadsheet shows, or the type of advertising in fancy magazines, street billboards, the subway or a supermarket leaflet.

At all these levels the possible expression of ideologies is obvious, for instance through the graphical emphasis of positive values with ingroups, and negative values with outgroups. Through images, photos, text placement, page layout, letter type, colour and other graphical properties, thus, meanings and mental models may be manipulated, and indirectly the ideological opinions implied by them. A serious theory spells out what graphical structures exactly may have which of these various functions?

Sound

The phonetic and phonological expression structures of discourse (the 'sounds'), though systematically studied since the beginning of modem linguistics and phonetics, have also been neglected in discourse analysis. 3 Articulation or auditory reception or phonemes may be marginal to a typical discourse analyst who prefers to look at discourse structures beyond those of words, phrases or sentences. Yet, pitch, volume and intonation are a rich source of variation by which, as in graphical expressions, emphasis, prominence or distinctiveness may be controlled as a function of semantic and ideological importance and relevance, as well as of opinion, emotion and social position (as in authoritarian commands versus polite requests). Since most conversation analysts work with transcripts, precisely these 'sound structures' tend to be partly ignored in analyses, or reduced to rather crude forms of representation or description, with the exception of the study of applause in public address.

Especially interesting for ideological analysis is the fact that subtle sound variation may directly code for underlying opinions in event and context models, that is, without explicit semantic articulation: Admiration, praise, derogation, blame and many other functions of discourse may thus be signalled implicitly — and hence deniably — as a function of ideological beliefs. The sound structures of talk to or among women and men, whites and blacks, superiors and subordinates, and generally ingroup and outgroup members, may thus display, emphasize, conceal or persuasively convey ideologically based opinions about events or the participants in the context.

Morphology

The study of word-formation is not exactly a main focus of concern in most types of discourse studies, and usually associated with traditional sentence grammatical research. Since stylistic variation, compared with other levels of utterances, is limited here, the ideological impact on the way words are formed in text and talk seems to be marginal, especially in languages that do not allow compounds. Where relevant, for instance in the study of neologisms, such ideological effects usually will be studied in lexical stylistics.

Syntax

On the other hand, the study of sentence forms, syntax, has drawn attention from (critical) linguists interested in ideological analysis from the start. 5 Variatioñ in the order or hierarchical relations of the structures of clauses and sentences is a well-known expression of dimensions of meaning as well as of other underlying semantic and pragmatic functions. Thus, order and hierarchical position may signal importance and relevance of meanings, and