New York: Academic Press. 1983. — 423 p.The volume Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (1983), co-authored by a linguist and a psychologist, marks a new ‘surge’ since ‘around 1970’ (SD ix, 1). ‘The study of discourse’ arose from the decision that ‘actual language use in social contexts’, rather than ‘abstract or ideal language systems’, ‘should be the empirical object of linguistic theories’ (SD 1f, ix) (cf. 3.1; 4.17; 5.65; 8.50, 9.6f; 13.14, 36). The study requires an ‘interdisciplinary background’ and ‘diverse’ ‘scientific approaches': ‘linguistic analysis’, ‘psychological laboratory experiments’, ‘sociological field studies’, ‘computer understanding of text’ and so on (SD 19, ix) (cf. 13.22f). We can also look to ‘historical sources': ‘classical poetics and rhetoric’, ‘Russian Formalism’, ‘Czech Structuralism’, and ‘literary scholarship’ (SD 1). More recent work comes from ‘sociolinguistics’, examining ‘forms’ and ‘variations of language use’ like ‘verbal dueling and storytelling’; and from ‘anthropology’ and ‘ethnography’, moving from ‘verbal art’ in ‘myths, folktales, riddles’, etc. to ‘a broader analysis of communicative events in various cultures’, notably in ‘conversational interaction’ (SD 2). Today, ‘we witness a major ‘integration of theoretical proposals’ in ‘the wide new field of cognitive science’.
Van Dijk and Kintsch now undertake to ‘present a broadly based, general, coherent approach to the investigation of discourse phenomena’, following the precept that ‘contextual information’ applies to ‘the whole range of communicative behaviour’ (SD ix, 238). Their ‘programmatic statements’ look ahead to ‘the future development of an interdisciplinary cognitive science’ (SD 19). Though their ‘theoretical outline’ is not ‘a worked-out information processing model’, ‘fully formalized and explicit’, they offer a ‘reasonably complete’ ‘framework for a theory’ within which ‘such models can be constructed eventually’ ‘given a particular comprehension situation’ (SD x, 95, 346, 351, 383, 385; cf. 11.21, 44, 90ff; 13.63). Their ‘model is general and flexible enough’ to be ‘later specified’, or ‘embedded’ ‘into a broader model of strategic verbal interaction in the social context’ (SD 9). This prospect befits the precept that a ‘social model should’ ‘have a cognitive basis’ and expound ‘strategies’ for ‘understanding, planning’, and ‘participating in interaction’. e.g., in ‘interpreting discourse’ (SD 19) (13.35). We might thus bridge the ‘gap between linguistic theory’ and ‘theory of social interaction’ (cf. 9.2, 6f). ‘Translating abstract textual structures into more concrete on-line cognitive processes’ can suggest how to do the same with ‘abstract structures of interaction and social situations’.
