ll AYD COYTEÍ ll Explorations in the Semanties and Pragmatics of Discourse '[LEN ¡l.: l DI JK 1,0NG 1AN o LINGUISTICS• LIBRARY LONG 0AN • LINGUISTICS• LIBRARY General Editors R. H. Robins, Unn.'crnl-vof London Martin Harris, Unniuersit) o/Essex Text and Corle .t considers Neme fundamental topics in the semantics and pragmatics ol'discourse. The book is divided finto tvv'o parís, each preceded by a chapter giving the necessary theoretical background to what Ccillciws. "I he volume thereforeserves both asa stimulating introduction and as a niajor contribution to the studv of discourse. In the (irst part of the 1)ook, Dr van Dijk explores basic issuesin the semantics of discourse: the conditions for connecting clauses and sentences, the properties of natural connectiaes and the coherence oí sentence-sequences. Part I'tvo investigates the pragmatic relat ions betsw'een sexi arnd cc)mnlunicativ e cOnlexl, analvsing discoui se in tca ms of sequences of speech acts. As in his discussion of semantics, llr van Dijk establishes conditions of connection and coherernce, and introduces the notion of the `macro spe ech act' to explain the overall coherenc:e of discourse and conveisation. Thefin gvrticstudyofdiscnuaselaa p»ofitcdh1T.A. van. llíjk',s Iextand Context . .. tu isreviev'ercaiinotremembe hav og reada more ,rtino/Jatüig lexlintlr.erecerit postno a he/ter ooganized on e.' Internationai Rcview of Applied Linguistics Teun A.. van Uijk is Reader in Linguistics at thc Lniverstty of , Ainsterdain. Coser illustrata .1 detall froni The fntrigw h5- )ame. F.nscn . 1890. Reproducedby kind permission of the Koninklijk Mu.seuni loor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. ISBN D-582-291D5-4 _ .., ^ IIY^IIII^II,GI,IIII^Wll6 LONGMAN LINGUISTICS LIBRARY TEXT AND CONTEXT EXPLORATIONS IN THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF DISCOURSE LONGMAN LINGUISTICS LIBRARY General editors Pidgin and Creole Languages R. H. Robins, University of London SUZANNE ROMAINE Martin Harris, University of Essex General Linguistics An lntroductory Survey Fourth Edition A Short History of Linguistics R.H. ROBINS Third Edition R. H. ROBINS A History of English Phonology CHARLES JONES Structural Aspects of Language Change Generative and Non-linear JAMES M. ANDERSON Phonology JACQUES DURAND Text and Context Explorations in the Semantics and Modality and the English Modais Pragmatics of Discourse Second Edition TEUN A.VANDIJK F. R. PALMER Introduction to Text Linguistics Linguistics and Semiotics ROBERT-ALAIN DE BEAUGRANDE YISHAI TOBIN AND WOLFGANG ULRICH DRESSLER Multilingualism in the British Isles 1: the Older Mother Spoken Discourse Tongues and Europe A Model for Analysis EDITED BY SAFDER ALLADINA WILLIS EDMONDSON AND VIV EDWARDS Psycholinguistics Multilingualism in the British Language, Mlnd, and World Isles II: Africa, Asia and DANNY D. STEINBERG the Middle East EDITED BY SAFDER ALLADINA Dialectology AND VIV EDWARDS W. N. FRANCIS Dialects of English Principies of Pragmatics Studies in Grammatical Variation GEOFFREY N. LEECH EDITED BY PETER TRUDGILL AND J. K. CHAMBERS Generative Grammar GEOFFREY HORROCKS Introduction to Bilingualism CHARLOTTE HOFFMANN Norms of Language Theoretical and Practica! Aspects English Verb and Noun Number: RENATE BARTSCH A functional explanation WALLIS REID The English Verb Second Edition English in Africa F. R. PALMER JOSEF S. SCHMIED A History of American English Linguistic Theory J. L. DILLARD The Discourse of Fundamental Works ROBERT DE BEAUGRANDE Text and Context Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse Teun A. van Dijk University of Amsterdam > > LONGMAN LONDON AND NEW YORK Longman Group UK Limited Longman House, Burnt Mil¡, Harlow Essex CM20 2JE, England and Associated Companies throughout the world Published in the United States of America by Longman Inc., New York © Longman Group Ltd 1977 Al¡ rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publishers, or a licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. First published 1977 First published in paperback 1980 Sixth impression 1992 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Dijk, Teun Adrianus van Text and context.-(Longman linguistics Library; no. 21) 1. Discourse analysis 1. Title 415 P302 79-41280 ISBN ❑ -582-29105-4 Produced by Longman Singapore Publishers Pte Ltd Printed in Singpaore for Doro Preface One of the major recent developments in linguistics and its neighbouring disciplines is the increasing attention being paid to the relevance of various kinds of CONTEXT. Renewed attempts are made in sociolinguistics and the social sciences to define the systematic relationships between social and cultural contexts and the structures and functions of language. In particular, philosophy of language has shown the linguist how pragmatic context constitutes the conditions determining the appropriateness of natural lan- guage utterances taken as speech acts. Similarly, more emphasis is being given to the fact that utterances of natural language may be theoretically reconstructed as sequences of sen- tences, in which morpho-phonological, syntactic and semantic properties of a sentence are accounted for in relation to those of other sentences of the sequence. Besides this recognition of its role of `verbal context', eg in the explication of such notions as coherence, the sequence is also being studied in its own right, viz as DISCOURSE. Some of the properties of discourse have received attention from a proper linguistic point of view, eg in the framework of so-called TEXT GRAMMARS, whereas other specific structures of discourse and discourse processing are now being investigated in cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and poetics. This book is intended as a contribution to the more specific linguistic study of discourse. It summarizes and further elaborates part of the investigations I have been undertaking lince the publication of my dissertation Some Aspecrs of Text Grammars in 1972. I am acutely aware of the weaknesses of that book. The present study therefore aims at providing some corrections by establishing a more explicit and more systematic approach to the linguistic study of discourse. Yet, the nature of this book is more modest. Instead of devising a large programmatic framework, I have preferred to do exploratory viii PREFACE research on some more specific, but fundamental, topics of a theory of discourse, viz on such notions as CONNECTION, COHERENCE, TOPIC OF DISCOURSE, and THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF DISCOURSE, which have received too little attention in recent (text) grammati- cal research. Furthermore, no particular claims are made for the format of a possible grammar of discourse; nor do I attempt a critique of other proposais made on the issues treated in this book. Topics such as quantification, pronominalization, presupposition, etc, which have been extensively studied both in sentence grammars and text grammars in the last few years, have been ignored in this book in favour of an inquiry into other basic problems of semantics and pragmatics. One of these problems for instance is that regarding the relationship between COMPOSITE SENTENCES on the one hand and SEQUENCES OF SENTENCES on the other hand. It turns out that such an investigation cannot be made without appeal to a sound PRAGMATIC THEORY, because a characterization of discourse in terms of sequences of sentences simultaneously requires an account of conditions on sequences of speech acts. Although it will be claimed that, both at the semantic and the pragmatic levels, MACRO-STRUCTURES of discourse and conversation should be postu- lated, especially in order to account for the notion of TOPIC OF DISCOURSE used to define linear connection and coherence in composite sentences and sequences, this book will pay only limited attention to macro-structures, for which separate treatment in terms of cognitive processes and of other theories, eg of narrative structures, is necessary. As already mentioned, my observations are not being made within the framework of a specific type of grammar: rather, my theoretical tools are borrowed from certain domains of philosophy, philosophical logic, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. This is not without methodological problems, but these have had to be passed over without thorough discussion here. One of these problems concerns the nature of the notion of in- terpretation as defined respectively by a FORMAL SEMANTICS and COGNITIVE SEMANTICS. Thus, the assignment of semantic structures to discourse is based both on abstract 'logical' conditions and on conditions defined in terms of conventional world knowledge, and it is not easy to determine a priori which of these should be made explicit in a more specific linguistic semantics of discourse. Similar remarks should be made on the precise status of a pragmatic theory with respect to a grammar, in a strict sense, on the one hand, and the philosophy and logic of action and the theory of social interaction on the other hand. More than ever, the linguist finds hirnself at the crossroads of several disciplines, and a more or less arbitrary restriction on the domain and problems of linguistic theory would not be fruitful at the moment for the development of new approaches to the study