Van Dijk’s recent work (1995, 1997) offers a theory of ideology, including attitudes and opinions, in relation to discourse, approached from the framework of critical discourse analysis. He analyses the discursive side of ideologies, that is, ‘the ways ideologies articulate themselves at the level of discourse meaning’ (1995: 243), claiming that discourse structures ‘are monitored by underlying ideologies’ (1995: 243). In his analysis of the relation between cognitive structures and discursive structures of texts, he pays special attention to written language (newspaper articles) or spoken language (congress speeches), but not to conversation, so that dialogic structures of discourse, which are the object of my study, are not analysed in his research.
In van Dijk’s view, ideologies are systems of social cognitions, shared by social groups, that are evaluative: ‘they provide the basis for judgements about what is good or bad, right or wrong, and thus also provide basic guidelines for social perception and interaction’ (1995: 248). Thus, a racist ideology is shared by members of a social group, e.g. the Nazis, and their negative values towards the Jews influence how these people are perceived and how interaction with them is monitored.
As many ideologies categorise people as Us vs. Them (whites vs. blacks, Protestants vs. Catholics), ideologies may be conceived as a group self-schema consisting of categories that organise the evaluative propositions defining the group. These categories would include identity/membership (origin, appearance, ethnicity, gender, language, religion), tasks/activities, goals, norms/values, position (in relation to other groups), and resources (to employments, health, housing, welfare, income, knowledge, public discourse...). It should be emphasised that these categories reflect the self-image of a social group, not social reality. According to van Dijk, we also ‘develop ideologies about work, education, the relationships between men and
women, or social structure’ (1987b: 194). Moreover, sets of ideologies may be further organised at higher levels and characterised in general terms such as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, depending on the goals and values of the social members sharing them.
One of the functions of ideologies is ‘to organise more specific clusters of socially shared opinion-schemata about social issues’ (1995: 253), that is, attitudes. As part of ideologies, attitudes are socially shared evaluative cognitions schematically organised, so that they can be effectively searched, activated, or applied. People develop attitude schemata in order to deal with their social life: other people, groups, and socially relevant objects or episode types (e.g. nuclear plants). As general knowledge, attitudes are not ad hoc beliefs about particular persons and events but are context-free, general and abstract. This implies that attitudes, as scripts and schemata, are organised in schematic clusters and are stored in social or semantic memory.
The link between attitude schemata and opinions is formed by situational models. A situational model, see 2.3.2, is the speech participant’s mental representation of a specific situation, including both knowledge and opinions about that situation. In a given communicative situation, participants create situational models which include opinions about each other, about the actual text or talk, or about other contextual features (e.g. time, place, circumstances). For example, a group of people may share a negative attitude schema towards nuclear plants in general. But more particularly, a member of the group may have a specific situational model about the construction of this nuclear plant, including his negative opinion about it, which, in this case, is the instantiation of his attitude schema.
In Communicating Racism (1987b), van Dijk makes a distinction within
strictly particular, as my particular opinion of this apple or of my neighbour, or they may be general, as in the instantiation of socially shared attitudes, such as a negative attitude towards blacks in a racist ideology. General opinions are the discursive realisation of attitudes, since ‘attitude application takes place through the instantiation of general opinions in situation models’ (1987b: 191). Particular opinions are not further analysed in van Dijk’s work, and they are not even dealt with in his later research (1995, 1997), since his goal is the analysis of general opinions as the actualisation of attitude schemata in context models. An added difficulty is that, in more recent work, ‘general’ opinions are recalled ‘personal’ opinions, increasing the confusion between them. As the only distinction between general and particular opinions is their origin, either socially shared or individual, I consider that their linguistic realisation does not differ so that particular opinions will be revealed in the same discursive structures listed above as reflecting general opinions. In conclusion, context models feature opinions, which may be particular or general. General opinions are the realisation of attitude schemata, which at the same time are the components of ideologies and sets of ideologies:
Van Dijk states that opinions, as well as other functions of context models (intentions, purposes, goals, perspectives, expectations), affect the structures of text and talk, and vice versa, structures of discourse may in turn affect the structure or contents of context models’ (1997: 198). Hence, major discourse levels (pragmatic, semantic, syntactic) are influenced by the information in context models. For
General ► Attitude schemata ► Ideology ► Sets o f ideologies Opinions
example, stylistic variation of lexical choice may be a function of opinions represented in context models. Conversely, discourse levels will influence the contents of context models, including opinions. The two-way influence of the relationship between discourse structures and context models is represented in the following diagram:
DISCOURSE <--- ► CONTEXT
STRUCTURES MODELS
Use o f linguistic structures: Mental representation o f discourse including opinions and knowledge: -is influenced by opinions in context
models -is influenced by linguistic structures -influences opinions in context -influences the choice o f particular models linguistic structures.
As far as the use of vocabulary is concerned, lexical items encode knowledge as well as opinions, as in the triplet ‘freedom fighter’, ‘guerrilla’, and ‘terrorist’ (1997: 209), which suggests a more or less positive evaluation by the speaker. Therefore, speech participants express their opinions from their own social position (i.e. Left, Right, feminist), and these positions are expressed in context models through self presentation and choice of lexical items: ‘the context model defines the ways language users socially self-define themselves and other participants in the present
communicative situation’ (1997: 209). Van Dijk considers that, apart from the choice
of lexical items, there are several discourse structures that are affected by context models, so that they reveal opinions and ideologies indirectly:
(i) semantic structures: topic, focus, prepositional structure, local coherence, level of description, implications and macrostructures (van Dijk 1995) (ii) syntactic structures: agency, responsibility, causality
(iii) rhetorical structures: metaphor, alliteration, litotes, mitigation and irony (iv) expression structures: sound structures (intonation, stress, standard
language, sociolectal/dialectal pronunciation), graphical structures (lay out, print size, photographs), non-verbal structures (gestures, proximity) (see van Dijk 1997: 208-213).
Van Dijk does also mention that information in context models, participant’s knowledge and opinions, play a role in the production and interpretation of the pragmatic properties of discourse, so that pragmatic structures may be considered the fifth group of the above list:
Context models are crucial in the planning and understanding o f a large number o f discourse properties, usually summarized in ‘pragmatic’ terms, such as speech acts, politeness and self presentation. However, they also play a role in the monitoring and interpretation o f style variation, since lexical choice and word order may be a function o f the communicative context, or rather o f our (possibly biased) mental representation o f the communicative situation in context models. An ‘informal’ context, as represented in a model, will thus influence the choice o f ‘informal’ lexical variants in the expression o f meaning. That is, the information (knowledge and opinions) organized in context models monitors the ways the models o f events and actions, as discussed above, will be ‘formulated’ in actual discourse. Context models also define the point o f view and perspective and their associated opinions, from which the events o f a model will be described in discourse, and hence explain the crucially ideological implications o f social position, (van Dijk 1995: 253)
Following van Dijk’s example of an ‘informal’ context influencing the choice of ‘informal’ lexical variants, I propose that, in pragmatic terms, the ‘informal’ context will also influence the participant’s choice of politeness strategies (i.e. less polite
forms and redressive strategies) and speech acts (i.e. commands instead of requests) and consequently, the participant’s self-presentation style. This point is particularly relevant for the rest of this section because I will analyse how pragmatic properties of the characters’ conversations are influenced by their ideologies and particular opinions about each other.
The emphasis in this section will be in the linguistic analysis of particular opinions as the counterpart of character’s particular mind styles and of general opinions as the counterpart of ideological point of view:
Van Dijk’s notions from critical discourse analysis
Semino’s notions from cognitive stylistics
Particular opinions Mind style
General opinions (Attitude schemata)
Ideological point of view