(1) But the Supreme Court's
Semantic contrast. General political knowledge: Legal victory government Makes use of marijuana difficult.
(2) the Supreme Court's verdict
Definite description. Presupposition. General/National political knowledge about legal affairs: Legal victory Verdict. Specific knowledge (mental model): Readers know about the verdict.
(3) Supreme Court
Name of institution. General/National political knowledge; scriptal knowledge: legal victory of government because of Supreme Court decision.
(4) unanimous verdict
Topic. Nominalization. Legal knowledge about Supreme Court: unanimous decisions presuppose consensus.
(5) against a California cooperative set up
Participant. Legal knowledge: The losing party of the trial. Social-Political knowledge: California is (more) liberal in drug matters. Specific knowledge (public mental model): Readers know about the California plans.
(6) to supply marijuana to qualified patients
New social knowledge: Marijuana is a useful medicine for seriously ill people. Specific knowledge: People know about these actions of the California cooperative. Medical knowledge: Patients are beneficiaries of treatment. Implication: legitimization of drug use.
(7) need not terminate all efforts
Predicate. Causal relation. Legal-Political knowledge: Supreme Court prohibition implies problems for a social program.
(8) to help those who have no reasonable alternative treatment.
Social knowledge: Goal of actions of participant. General-Medical knowledge: Patients 哙 Treatment Causality; Implication: Marijuana is morally/medically necessary.
(9) the verdict
Definite expression. Topic. Specific knowledge: Verdict known while mentioned before.
(10) simply shifts the onus to the individual patients
Predicate. Legal knowledge: Official prohibition does not end "illegal" practices. Implication: Individual patients are victims of verdict. Opinion implication: Government and Supreme Court are immoral.
(11) or to compassionate state governments
Participant. Legal-Political knowledge: States have some freedom to act independently of Supreme Court decision. General knowledge: Help very ill patients is compassionate. Implication: Government / Supreme Court are not passionate.
(12) to obtain marijuana for medical purposes
Predicate. Goal. Global coherence: to get marijuana for terminally ill patients.
(13) and test the limits of federal intransigence
Predicate. Goal. Presupposition: Federal government is intransigent. Social-political knowledge: Conflict States: Government. General knowledge: Intransigence is immoral. Social knowledge: Not helping patients is immoral.
This brief analysis shows the following about the relations between discourse and knowledge:
a. Comprehension of this passage first of all requires a huge amount of general knowledge, in this case especially political, legal and medical knowledge:
?about the role of the (federal) government, the possible conflicts with the States, etc.
?the implications of (unanimous) Supreme Court decisions
?how to treat seriously ill patients
?the role of marijuana in such treatment.
b. Local and global coherence requires specific (mental model) knowledge about specific event (this particular case); for instance, this allows the editorial to mention the Supreme Court only in the second sentence, although already presupposed in the expression 'legal victory' in the first sentence. Similarly, the definite NP 'the verdict' similarly presupposes that the reader already knows the case. In sum, reading an editorial usually means that readers already have a mental model about an event, and the editorial may presuppose this knowledge to be known to many readers.
c. Knowledge is being presupposed and asserted also as part of expressing and constructing opinions, as is the case for the use of expressions such as 'benighted efforts', 'desperately ill patients', 'qualified patients', 'no reasonable alternative treatment', 'compassionate' and 'intransigence'. These expressions (in context) all imply that the government (and even the Supreme Court) is immoral.
d. Context model knowledge is being presupposed in the use of explicit opinion expressions (in principle excluded in news reports) and hence the critique of the government by the newspaper, the presupposed previous knowledge of the readers (about the California marijuana experiments, about the decision of the Supreme Court, etc), general-political knowledge (about government etc) that resolve referential expressions (the government); the social implications of the editorial: support for patients in an important social issue (medical use of marijuana).
These and many more types of relationships that need to be discovered in further research, are not merely semantic-cognitive, but also show up in formal structures, for instance in definite expressions (the federal government), definite articles (the verdict), nominalizations (effort), connectives (but), embedded clauses vs. main clauses (in its benighted efforts to prevent& ), adjectives that express opinions (desperately ill; qualified patients). Also for these many properties of discourse, we need to examine in more detail how they signal the way language users express, signal, emphasize or hide knowledge and other social cognitions.
Conclusion
In this paper we have argued that CDA, and discourse studies in general, need a detailed theory of the role of knowledge in discourse production and comprehension. Current work on knowledge in several disciplines often ignores the results of research in other disciplines. Against this background, this article pleads for a broad, multidisciplinary theory of knowledge in order to be able to describe in detail the interface between discourse and knowledge. Even a simple typology of discourse, as presented here, already shows how complex a theory of discourse processing becomes when we take into account such different types of knowledge, and how they influence the production and comprehension. And since knowledge must (also) be defined in the social terms of beliefs shared and ratified by an epistemic community, this means that a cognitive theory of text processing needs an important social and cultural dimension: what is being expressed and presupposed in discourse depends on the social nature of the (members of) groups, so that a true, integrated socio-cognitive theory of knowledge-discourse processing can be developed. It was also shown that an indispensable theoretical device to do this, is the notion of a context model, that is, the mental representation (stored in episodic memory) of the communicative context. Knowledge is an important category of context models, namely the device that regulates pragmatic (deictic) interpretation, the adequate use of many pronouns, and in general of style. Finally, we demonstrated these complex relationships between knowledge, text and context in an exploratory analysis of an editorial in the NYT.
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Bionote
Teun A. van Dijk professor of discourse studies at the University of Amsterdam. After earlier work in literary studies, text grammar and the psychology of text comprehension, his research in the 1980s focused on the study of news in the press and the reproduction of racism through various types of discourse. In each of these domains, he published several books. His present research in 'critical' discourse studies focuses on the relations between power, discourse and ideology. His latest book is Ideology (Sage, 1998). He founded the international journals TEXT, Discourse & Society and Discourse Studies, of which he still edits the latter two. He is editor of the 4-volume Handbook of Discourse Analysis, as well as the recent 2 volume introduction Discourse Studies. A Multidisciplinary Introduction (Sage, 1997). He lectured widely in Europe and the Americas, and was visiting professor at several universities in Latin America. He is now visiting professor of the Faculty of Translation of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
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