English as an Exclusionay Language

'That Danish top politicians say things they do not intend is easy to document, for instance when the former Foreign Secretary at the completion of an EU summit meeting referred to the ‘so-called Edinburg agreement’, implying that Denmark was not bound by what had just been laboriously agreed (the Danish cognate for ‘so-called’ serves purely to identify something, not to indicate a distancing from what is referred to, as in English). Or when the Prime Minister was asked at a press conference with Salman Rushdie whether there was clear evidence of a plot against his life, to which PM replied that he did not have ‘the ability’ to answer the question. What he presumably intended was that he was unable to answer the question, i.e. security reasons prevented him from doing so, as opposed to his personal mental faculties being inadequate.These examples demonstrate just how complex and treacherous a language English is, not least for experienced users of it as a foreign language' (Phillipson 2000:173)

I have had one episode like that, to say the least.

Contextual Knowledge Management in Discourse Production, Cognitive Explantion of Discourse Practice

Contextual Knowledge Management in Discourse Production, A CDA Perspective by Van Dijk in Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton (Ed) a new agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis (2005)

Van Dijk’s notion of ‘Knowledge Device’ and its role in explaining the process of interpretation and production of discourse in this article is, as far as I am concerned, an absolutely necessary concept in theory of discourse analysis and its relevance in social studies. K-Device and ‘context model’ by which major functions of discourse in formation of belief system -specially in terms of Van Dijk’s more collective scoop of institution, national and cultural belief- are elements of a logical explanation on why mass discursive practice like that of media has such a pivotal role in modern lifestyle belief (and I would also say truth) formation system.

Rather than engaging with research on the-taken-for-granted assumption of many CDA scholars that discourse has a major role in ideology production, this article actually tries to ‘explain’ in what terms and conditions discourse is bound to be loaded by such a colossal role.

This common presupposed and unaccounted assumption of many CDA applied research works is part of the platform of Chilton’s criticisms about the theory of CDA (Chilton 2005). However, unlike Chilton’s panicky urge for CDA to make a major shift towards cognitive psychology (he goes as far as seeing CDA basically useless), Van Dijk continues his work of integrating notions of cognitive psychology in theories of discourse and actually illustrates how these notions help establish a stronger approach for CDA. Van Dijk is recently interested in accounting for a comprehensive context model for DA in his recent works and tries to ‘explain’ mental processes at work in understanding and production of discourse. Yet, he has not abandoned the notion of social commitment in CDA in his work. That is why the light he throws on the socio-cognitive nature of discourse phenomenon is a step forward for CDA research.

There are some points and quotes that I found most interesting in regards to the questions lingering in my mind and the comments that I had to add based on my understanding of the potential applications of these notions and their relevance.


What Van Dijk says about the definition of ‘Knowledge’ is not that much in its more traditional epistemological terms rather it is a more pragmatic and psychological definition as he says on his definition of ‘knowledge’:

‘This very succinct definition is rather pragmatic and socio-cognitive than philosophical and abstract , and does not feature, for instance, the notion of ‘truth’, as it is used in the traditional definition of knowledge in epistemology as ‘justified true beliefs’(73)

The relationship between ‘belief’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ is an interesting one. I see them as one following another one, where ‘knowledge’ – at its more collective scale- can constitute what a society conceives as ‘truth’ that is why I do not see why Van Dijk says that his account does not deal with the notion of ‘truth’.

I do not see why or how the notion of ‘knowledge’ needs a redefinition or why the string of cognition, belief, knowledge, and truth can not be assumed.

He goes on

‘I take truth as a notion that only applies to language use and discourse or speech act, and not to beliefs. Each community, or historical moment of a community, has its own criteria that allow members to establish that some beliefs are treated and shared as knowledge, whereas others are not….A belief is treated as knowledge in a community if it is presupposed in the public discourses of that community, for instance in storytelling, songs, or news reports (page 73)

This is a crucial point is the link between the current discourse of a community and its ideological outlook. This is why different communities may be living in two epistemologically different worlds even when talking about the same practical phenomenon of concrete nature. This does not necessarily happen between two national communities rather such a difference in take on events can be seen among different layers of the same national community too, based on family backgrounds, jobs, level of income and many other socio cultural factors. For instance, the way a community which is affiliated to the soldiers and army, like the family and friends of an army man may define ‘war’ and the ‘knowledge’ or belief they share about it can differ drastically with that of a community which is affiliated to family members who are engaged in relief effort for war stricken people. They both seem to ‘know’ what ‘war’ means but their ‘know ledges’ are horrendously different.

Van Dijk very rightfully calls for the necessary of an account which defines different kinds of knowledge and classifies ‘knowledge’ in terms of its Scope, Specficity, Concreteness, ‘Reality’, Objects, and firmness. The scope as is seen later on is the most important feature in its relation to DA. As far as the scope feature of ‘knowledge’ goes there are, personal, interpersonal, group, organization, nation, and culture kinds of ‘knowledge’ (73)

‘Much knowledge of the world’ is general, abstract, and shared by members of a whole culture. It is this knowledge that is presupposed in the public discourse of that culture’ (74)

In the regards to the definition of context Van Dijk says that, what for many CDA analysts constitute ‘context’ is basically the situational properties of a certain discursive event which are relevant in production and understanding. However, the relevant properties of a situation which are the most important element in one’s interpretation of a text are constructed by the person’s mind and the classic situational relevance cannot directly implement itself in the properties of the discourse in its production or interpretation. Thus there is a dialectical and interactional relationship between the classic relevant properties of discourse and the subjective relevance model in the individual’s mind or his mental models.

In van Dijk’s words:

‘I therefore define a context as the mental representation of the participants about the relevant properties of the social situation in which participants interact, and produce and comprehend text or talk. This mental representation is called ‘context model’. (76)

Context models explain why different people interpret a situation differently and what makes them relay the same event differently in their narrations. Another aspect of context is that it is dynamic. That means, people’s mental models are flexible entities which are constantly being influenced. That explains why airing out different narrations of events is so crucial in a society in which essential context models of people are not formed or influence by day to day individual interactions but by mass influence of discourses of media. This leads us to assigning a pivotal role to a well equipped, well thought freedom of speech along with diversity in civil society apparatus through which, firstly, a diverse array of potential collective context models exist and secondly all groups have the means to influence the discursive sphere of the society. This, in turn takes us to the notion of discursive (deliberative) democracy of Habermas.

Discourse changes what people ‘know’ or their collective ‘knowledge’ and hence influences mental models of interpretation of the public.

Other aspects which contribute to context model when interacting or doing a discursive practice, are; intentions, the addressees, nature of this practice, and institutional setting. It is what we know about them, what we know they want to know, and what is relevant.

Yet, the K-device is the key concept in shaping all these others factors. That is they all can be thought of integral part of K-device even the way we come to ‘know’ ourselves.

The personal knowledge or interpersonal level of knowledge are not necessarily discursive that is the knowledge has an empiricist nature but when we go to a larger scope of group, organization, and nation this knowledge has to take a form of abstraction where not every member of the group has that concrete empiricist knowledge hence, group ideologies are necessarily discursive.

‘National knowledge is the knowledge shared by citizen of a country. It is typically acquired at school and through the mass media and presupposed by all public discourse in the country’ (79)

‘Cultural knowledge is the fundamental Common Ground for all other discourses and for all other kinds of knowledge, and hence presupposed by all discourse...of cultures. Most of what is traditionally called knowledge of the world is cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge is usually general an abstract, and hence not about concrete social or historical events, as is the case of much of national knowledge. (80)

In a brilliant part Van Dijk shows what the mechanisms of process of stereotyping can be based on the knowledge definitions. These are the general rules of what mental processes are at work when individuals are engaged in a discursive practice;

‘if the recipients are believed to be members of another epistemic community, then activate knowledge about that other community’ [this is where by activation of this sort people who have not had any personal or interpersonal knowledge about that community have to rely on the media presentation of that other recipients and probably remember only the sharp points about them] If such knowledge fails, assume that knowledge may be the same or similar to that of your own community. When in doubt, ask or otherwise show ignorance’ (80)

We see that there is a gradual transition between general cultural knowledge and specific personal knowledge the first is virtually always presupposed to be known the latter virtually always presupposed to be unknown to the recipients [and the first is abstract and discursively formed by grand narratives of which media is a big part of and the second is first hand or second hand account of experiences] (80)

Thus, we generally take the meta collective scale knowledge for granted while the bigger the scale becomes the less concrete and unmediated is our knowledge. On the same note Van Dijk gives another general role of how mental models work;

‘What the media have not reported before, the recipients don’t know’ [and what has been covered before is taken for granted to be part of the truth architecture] (82)

‘We have assumes a difference between e.g. personal, interpersonal, group, institutional, national and cultural knowledge, of which the first tend to be represented as specific, autobiographical event knowledge, that is, as mental models in episodic memory, and the latter as more general knowledge in ‘social’ memory’ (85)

According to Van Dijk CDA should ‘not only analyze the social conditions and consequences of discourse, and [it should] also [analyze] sociocognitive ones’

He gives two main arguments for this call;

‘firstly cognition is a necessary interface between discourse and society and secondly that cognitive structures we deal with are at the same time social as is the case for knowledge, attitudes, ideologies, norms and values.’(87)

CDA specifically deals with the study of discursive reproduction of power abuse, with forms of domination and social inequality (87)

Here Van Dijk comes to the consequences of such a knowledge based account and says:

‘If knowledge is defined as a socially certified, shared belief of a community, it is obvious that those groups or institutions who have preferential access to public discourse, such a as that of the media, or other forms of power and authority, such as politicians, professors or priests, are in an excellent position to influence people’s knowledge formation,(88)

One way of media manipulation which practically prints itself on peoples mind, is that they do not consider a belief or knowledge to exist if it has not been covered, That leads to a social mental models in people’s minds that ‘if it is not covered that it is not there’ like the case of right wing press where they get so confused and of course infuriated when they need to discuss racism in the society.

In a multi cultural nature of many European countries the process of perceptions and evaluation of media coverage is different for different cultural communities who do not have the knowledge archive and/ or knowledge architecture of ‘western’ type that means they may treat the discursive data hugely different from that of the main stream majority for whom the discursive practice is usually designed and performed.

As Van Dijk says there is huge work to be done on what the implications of assuming such universalistic approach on knowledge architecture of different communities, could be and I think this is a key issue in discussing the heated issues like ‘integration’ and the talk about so called none integrative immigrant communities or the notion of ‘terrorism’. Where these communities (none integrative immigrant ) may have different patterns and sources in what they ‘know’ and ‘believe’ and where to get the ‘truth’ and these mental sources are basically different with the sources of the general majority group. This can potentially lead to having two neighbours supposedly living under similar practices of social ‘knowledge’ e.g. media and yet having totally different takes on the world even about the most concrete every day activities while they live geographically a few feet away from each other. This can be sources of tension in producing racism or potentially dangerous ‘othering’ at both ends in a country with different cultural communities (or nations?!!!)

As an explicit example to show how K-device may work in a news report interpretation in people and in the patterns by which these assumptions of knowledge can manipulate and enact or reinforce a certain approach towards the given event, Van Dijk takes on a new report in Palestinian-Israeli conflict and shows what the knowledge structure of this piece of news report is and how certain parts of this structure may not be shared by none ‘American’ readership of this newspaper. It is how this presumption of old knowledge can feed the readers who do not have that previous knowledge to update and form their context model of the event.

On a more classic CDA take, he also talk about discursive manipulations in reporting the old knowledge segments in promoting a certain take on the pattern of the events e.g. calling the historical course of the events in the nominal of ‘confrontation’ or ‘violence’ while other none NYT readership may see these words very general if not misleading.

‘In other words, presupposed knowledge may not only take the form of (false) presumptions, but also presumptive forms of denying or hiding facts by euphemistic descriptions (95)

An analysis of the contextual K-device strategies used by journalists, such as this one, should carefully and critically examine not only what beliefs are taken for granted as knowledge, but also how this is done (95)

The metal cognitive role is reporting for a newspaper is;

Overall (meta) strategies…:when the recipients are members of my community, assume that they know all that I know except the information about recent personal experiences or sources not (yet) used by the recipients This will counts for both every day stereotyping as well as news in the press.(96)

This can explain why somebody from another cultural sphere seems to have a lot to share with the main stream culture of the new place he is in. As is the case of a none British individuals talking about issues both pertaining to England and international and the fact that almost everything that he might say is treated as new knowledge for the recipients of intact British individuals. This partly explains why there is a more liberal, comprehensive, multifaceted ideological framework seen at the academic institutions and universities where there are internationality and diversity.

The questions are now;

What is the procedure of understanding what knowledge architecture is at work in a certain community? Is it possible to do such a thing without living that culture? How can we categorize the differences among different communities or cultures in what they seem to ‘know’ about a certain event?

When Van Dijk himself categorises what constitutes old knowledge vs. new knowledge in that news report of NYT, does he rely on his subjective assumptions? Or there is a mechanism in tracking the old and new without being a member of that community or group. That is to ask if Van Dijk can do this categorisation about the NYT because he is a regular reader of NYT or he can do that about other news papers about which he doe not know a lot.

A Critical view on 'Missing the Links in Mainstream CDA, Paul Chilton'

Missing the Links in Mainstream CDA,Modles, Blends, and the Critical Instinct Paul Chilton'
Paul Chilton in this article makes some uprooting remarks against the mere necessity of CDA on the basis that it doesn’t focus on the explanation of what really happens in mind and its so called ignorance of evolutionary psychology. Although he admits that mainly Van Dijk in most of his works and Wodak in some of hers have been drawing on these ideas substantially but he does not find them on the right tract partly caused they are not incorporating enough of cognitive psychology in their methodology and partly due to commitment element which is explicit in their works.

On the same note somewhere in between he draws on to the classic debate of subjectivity vs. objectivity in science and the definition of ‘science’ which seems to be heavily out of context in discussion on CDA as it is a major paradigmic definition which needs to be dealt and done with before getting into more detailed discussion on disciplines like CDA.

Paul Chilton seems to strongly believe in the role of cognitive psychology and advocates the incorporation of cognitive psychology into CDA as the only way of meaningful survival of CDA which will then probably called cognitive Linguistics.

He argues that although attempts have been made to incorporate cognitive psychology in CDA specifically by Van Dijk 1984,19991,1993 etc and Reisigl and Wodak 2001, none have been really integrating it into their methodology of analysis. This is a point about the necessity, plausibility or desirability of which there is a lot of doubt. He argues that CDA should abandon its socio-cultural or socio-economic approaches of explanation in its discourse analysis while there is a strong belief that the sociological, cultural and historical characteristics of a society- e.g. bourgeois mood of life- do have a lot to explain about tendencies and macro reasons of mass formation of certain ideology in a society e.g. ‘racist’ among all the other ideological moods of a society. Besides, one would argue that drawing on sociological factor is not to necessarily negate the innate psychological process of ideology in humans and it is not clear why CDA should deprive itself of using all the resources available in its explanatory agenda.

He moves on and reviews some aspects of recent developments of cognitive psychology like, modularity of mind, initiative psychology, Machiavellian intelligence, intuitive biology, and cognitive fluidity, out of which the relevance of a limited number of the notions to CDA is partly established and the rest remains strictly decontextualized review of some cognitive psychology development.

He points out that Machiavellian intelligence (instrumental rationality in Habermasian terms I would say) is an innate biological characteristic of humans (or indeed among other human family primates) and by that we can explain the humans’ natural tendencies like social categorisation, interaction, manipulation etc and that is how we should look at the phenomenon rather than assuming them to have anything to do with social modes of life. And by that he concludes:

‘CDA as an academic and pedagogical enterprise might not be necessary at all. This startling interference could be drawn from the claim- indeed the evidence-that humans have in any case an innate ‘theory of mind [intuitive psychology] and a metarepresentationl module. If individual humans are innately Machiavellian, they are also innately able to counter one another’s machination. If language is crucial to this ability and associated activity, then they should have innate ability not just to use language in Machiavellian ways but to detect and counter one another’s Machiavellian use of language….the question is, given the forgoing remarks: what is CDA for f people can do it anyway?’ (p 31)


This conclusion is heavily simplistic. This seems to partly come from a common problem of all explanations which have their root in psychology or social psychology in which they are too individualistic in over generalising what happens in society based on how an individual mind works and over simplifying of reducing the social cognition to individual level.

What Chilton says in this quote is to reduce the highly complicated discoursal practice and mass communication of the modern life to some individual primate communication of the simplest nature. I do not think that we can deny that the tendency to generalize and categorise social phenomena is a natural trait in human and having this skill is not a matter of luxury but rather it is an essential feature in human conducts. Humans are sure equipped with such an apparatus to be able to deal with such a great deal of sophistications of social life. However, it is a naïve simplification to think that every body is equipped with the same level of expertise to manipulate a certain communicative event. If that were the case we would have expected any ordinary person to be able to do the job of the linguists, journalists, news writers, lecture writers, spin doctors or any body else whose essential work material is language. This is the case not only for CDA but for almost any other humanistic sciences where they seem to explain what seem is ‘obvious’ at first sight.

Besides, we agree that every body has this ability to recognise and probably counter attack unfavourable generalizations and manipulations in language use (which is definitely a fact in essence) but are we only dealing with interpersonal language use? What about the role of far ranging media, be it a newspaper, a TV channels or radio? Does the range of influence have nothing to do with the effects that a language mediated event may have? Do all people involved in a discourse which is manipulated by a newspaper get a chance to use their innate ability to counterattack? Is it just so simple and straight forward for every body to guess what ideology is behind a set of news casts? Does every ordinary person know how the process of selection, production, marketisation and deliverance of a piece of news work? Is manipulation or what Chilton calls ‘Machiavellian’ use of language just a very simple transparent endeavour which can be recognisable by every body?

He then continues to take up a social case of racism- acute anti-Semitic text of Mein Kempf- and by referring to Sperber’s experiments comes up with a diagram of how meta templates work in humans’ minds. The diagram reminds me of Chomsky’s notion of innate language apparatus of humans and how it can be fed by different linguistic date to produce the acquisition of different language. This diagram also indicates that we as humans have a metatemplate about living things and we tend to do analysis and categorisation of things naturally like the zoological hierarchy of animals we draw about animals. If this meta template is ‘initialised’ (exposed to a certain data in Chomsky’s notion) by ‘cultural input’ (discourse) of certain kind then it can start do produce any social categorisation e.g. racism or exclusionary ideologies. Figure 3 page 35. This may bring the danger of falling into a severe positivistic relativism where everything is natural.

He seems to be proposing a cognitive linguistics whose primary intention it is to add to the body of human understanding on how and why humans produce collective cognitions like ideologies. This as he mentions:

‘is not a means of combating directly those with whose ideologies we might disagree’ (p38)

That is, such an academic activity does not or can not distinguish between ‘good’ or ‘bad’, in other words CL as Chilton proposes does/can/should/may not have a ‘critical agenda’ and places itself into the rhyme of other purely ‘scientific’ activities.

On the same note he explains how by the use of cognitive insights Mein Kempf can be analysed and points out to Wodak’s work as being too limited in its range of explanation of ‘why’ this particular cognitive effect arise. That is, her work fails to have psychological account of what really happens in mind while on the other hand he calls on CDA to wholesomely leave the social, economic, historical analysis of the context to disciplines like political economy, sociology and history.

What he is not at this point acknowledging is that a CDA work (at least on cases like racism) is to raise an awareness and explain the patterns in which a wrong ideology is being proliferated and it is purely on these grounds that it draws on historical, political or sociological accounts like Wodak and Fairclough works or cognitive psychology among other sources in Van Dijk’s works. Even Van Dijk being the CDA scholar who is very interested in ‘why’ questions of Chilton’s type also gives a primary role to language as not merely a carrier but also a birth space of generalisations of collective ideologies where the group ideologies do not exist or at least cannot be formalised without some form of discourse being present. (Van Dijk 1991).

What Chilton proposes for CDA is strictly an apolitical linguistics which may act as an integral, data container of a cognitive psychology to contribute to human knowledge on mind or a data feeding phase for political science, sociology, or history disciplines in case CDA insists on staying ‘critical’. Thus, there is no such thing as ‘Discourse Analysis with an attitude’ (Wodak?).

What he is not considering is that CDA has been drawing upon sociology, history or political sciences as its ways of foregrounding its critique of the present social order and critique is an integral part of it. Even studies in which the researchers draw upon cognitive psychology like Van Dijk’s and some of Wodak’s are not neutral in what they want to achieve and have an explicit officially announced ‘critical agenda’ in fighting inequalities, criticising unfair power relations and dominance. It is strictly based on these causes that CDA is interested in cognitive psychology, sociology, history, political science or philosophy. Besides, CDA is trying to raise the awareness of public in the same trend as social phenomena are getting more and more complicated and in the same line raising awareness as a strictly modest summary of critical research has been quite effective in changing a lot of unfair ‘cognitive effects’ in the societies of modern life.

While CDA is about casting light on systems of ideas or macro ideological structures at work on showing what the process of manipulation is on a grand level by systemically drawing upon linguistic, discursive, semantic example on the inductive level, Chilton tries to reduce CDA to an unnecessary verbal analysis of a kind that any unacademic person is able to do.

Among other unfavourable conclusions that may be inferred from a ‘purely scientific’ notion of a field like CL, is the one that such an ethic-free analysis of human seems to reduce humans to the level of purely biological animals who just do what they do and principles among other notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ have no role to play. His account totally lacks or ignores the role of ethics and goodness in humans as a factor and humans are thought to do what their innate dispositions tell them to do. The history of what human on the other hand has not shown a stagnation of human development in that way. This heavy reduction of human to biology seems to be a bit irritating at times.

Paul Chilton’s article is a very strong challenge to CDA and how it should justify its existence as a strong academic field. He has some points there which need to be addressed by CDA scholars for example; the relationship between CDA and cognitive psychology and how they can/should interact, how actual cognitive processes in mind of individuals or collective ideologies in minds of groups are formed, need to be defined.

However, the main attribute of CDA remains to be its emancipatory agenda a critique on the base of the use of language which is the carrier and/or producer of most data in ideologies of any kind. Thus, if you take the element of social commitment out of CDA then nothing much will remain and the same goes for most studies of language use in society. What would remain is pure linguistics with its own range of influence and importance, a point form which we started from.

A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis, Three Models of Interdisciplinarity

Three Models of Interdisciplinarity, Theo Van Leeuwen(2005)in Wodak and Chilton(Ed) A New a Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis.

Three Models of Interdisciplinarilty by Theo Van Leeuwen is a far sighted look at the disciplines of CDA and what we arguably would call its ‘adjacent disciplines’. This article explains three approaches towards doing interdisciplinary research.

The ‘Centralist’ approach which can be called the traditional approach places itself in the centre and occasionally reaches out to other ‘adjacent disciplines’. the ‘Pluralist’ which is more into appreciating other disciplines as epistemologically equal but still considers the two or more disciplines involved as independent ones. The final one is called ‘Integrationist’ which emerges from interdependent of the disciplines completely. There is a summary of characteristics of these approaches on page 10.

There are two points to be mentioned here one is that we should not forget that the interdisciplinarity even in its most traditional sense is still a very recent trend and that many disciplines still resist this. Conventionally the researchers of one discipline consider the methodologies and theories of their own discipline as the most suitable and practical one and this belief naturally extends itself to epistemology of the discipline too. This is even the case for different research trends within the same discipline.

The other point which is also acknowledged by the author is that researches have been doing this mixing of disciplines in one way or another and that is why it is now may be necessary to have a categorisation of these approaches.

The article gives very interesting insights in terms of how interdisciplinarity in DA and social theory, social or cultural history and ethnography can flourish the knowledge weight of the research in CDA.

I liked the point mentioned on page 11 about the advantage that the social theorist have on spotting the right areas of research. According to Leeuwen this is partly because they have an ‘antenna’ for the new macro changes of society and life and partly because they do not have to carry the baggage of doing empirical analysis. They find the new territories put their flag there and leave it for other researchers with their empirical tools to come along and dig into it later on. (Page 11)

The other point is on page 12 on how historical trend of ‘conversationalisation’ and ‘simplification’ in media discourse has been a deliberate trend in bringing about specific social impression and expanding the range of influence of a discourse or rather it becomes the core message of it. This is particularly relevant to the revolutionary discourse in Iran after the 1979 and the neo revolutionary discourse of Ahmadi Nejad in 2005. The historical analysis of how this genre has become such a powerful tool in Iran and comparing it to similar cases in the discourses of Bush, BBC, Goebbels and Roosevelt can be an interesting case to be looked into in more details.