El discurso como interacción social

by Teun A. van Dijk (Coordinator)

How do people engage in, and manage discourse and interaction with others? Whether in informal, everyday conversations of professional dialogues, people do many things while they are speaking or writing. Focusing on the fundamental interactional, social, political, and cultural functions of text and talk, Discourse as Social Interaction shows that discourse is not merely form and meaning, but also action. The volume looks further at this social dimension of discourse by examining the role of social identity and group membership, such as those based on gender, race, and ethnicity. It asks these important questions: How do members of various groups typically speak among each other and how do they communicatr with people of other groups or cultures? What is the role of discourse in the perpetuation or legitimation of sexism or racism? Discourse as Social Interaction closes the gap between the micro analysis of very detailed structures of talk with the macro analysis of their functions and variation in social structure and culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, Linguistics

494 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 1997

About the author

Teun Adrianus van Dijk, is a scholar in the fields of text linguistics, discourse analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. With Walter Kintsch he contributed to the development of the psychology of text processing.

Reviews

[Alex Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fairly standard introductory text. Here we see a Foucaultean influenced approach to rhetoric in which the positions and interruptions, cuts and corrections of a text reproduce the power structures and people's places in them. Knowledge is presented as active positioning within a time index. This is managed through a variety of different contexts, each chapter meant to highlight a cut of institutional rhetoric, whether this is between sexes, as politicians, in a community, between races and so on. All the differentials are made available when we take a specific view -- with our knowledge of how those institutions work. Is this a manner of finding the information we want in the text? Or are we super imposing only one view? There is only one view available at a time, otherwise how can we tell if someone is behaving in this or that manner due to their positions in a transaction (store owner, customer) or race, or age or any other difference?

This is where discourse studies breaks down, because we can't isolate those interactions solely though one context at a time except in our study. In real life these contexts cross over each other and depattern one another.

In many ways this was a good refresher as to the many approaches and methods, although these different views only work because we assume an identity as a more basic substrate to the participants identity -- one founded on the unquestionable equality of subjectivity. It is only with this unquestionable "0 level equality" that we are able to understand that there is a difference in power between participants. This difference must then be attributed to the institution and their relative agency in their roles, because without it, how could we under that there is any differential at all (so therefore, they must be equal).

This normalization of equalization has often been the role of universities in order to insist that knowledge based approaches is a way to elitist enforced equality... that the advanced studies of rationalization (mostly only available to the wealthy) is the way for one to signify that one is more deserving to be equal and not fooled by the power differential of institutions used to create inequality.