Discourse Ideology and Context  Free Essay Example

Introduction

The Van Dijk’s article “Discourse, Ideology and context” is present some theoretical tools that can interpret the impact of ideological dialogue, it is focuses on the ideological nature of contextualization. It briefly summarizes Van Dijk’s own ideological concepts and develops some elements of the new context theory. And do this by incorporating these two methods into the way that ideology participates in the social cognitive processes of discourse production and understanding. In his example of white speakers about black, he summed up that “ideology may influence the way social attitudes are expressed in discourse structure.

” In this article, he divided the discuss into four parts to explain. Which are ideology, mental models, context models and ideological control of context models.

Ideology

To a large extent, ideology is obtained, disseminated and reproduced through text and talk. It includes feminism, socialism, pacifism and so on, but ideology does not have the function of found and legal rule. Ideology provides a social cognitive basis for the struggle against it.

However, ideology can be regarded as the social function of the goal and interest representative of social groups, as well as the ideological discourse analysis, and provide some suggestions for the ideological schema of the organization. In addition, the ideologies structure consist of six sections, which are identity, activities, goals, norms and values, group relations and resources.

Mental Models

According to Van Dijk, the mental models can be identified by human experience, it is the portrayal of specific behaviors that peoples witness, participate in or read and heard.

The composition of a person’s episodic memory can be called a mental model. A mental model usually represents the fact that people define facts. And the role of the mental model is to define the situation, which means that the mental model usually has personal opinions. These views may be examples of social attitudes, and social attitudes may be controlled by ideology. So, the mental models may be ideologically biased. The model of ideological bias constitutes the input of discourse production, and thus may produce biased themes, lexical items or metaphors, and many other attributes of discourse. In the discourse, people may form biased models based on their personal ideology. Disagreements between members of different groups do not mean that the group will not share attitudes or ideology to others, but they will only share it with members of individual groups.

Ideological Control of Context Models

Ideology can not only control the event model, but also control the context model. Context model and ideology are inseparable, because the structure of context model has confirmed this. This can be explained as that potential ideology can influence different types of context model and their content. For instance, The views held by feminists and anti-feminists are related to their beliefs, which are social and public resources. On this basis, we also can say that this is ideological.