Reflections on discourse and knowledge: An interview with Teun van Dijk

Abstract

Jozsef Andor: Thank you very much for accepting my call for an interview. I would like to start it by asking the “father” of modern text linguistics, author of the first, now classic, theoretically orientedmonograph, about the current state of the art. At the timewhenMouton inTheHague published your SomeAspects of Text Grammars, and in the periods immediately following it, text linguistics mainly concentrated on providing a grammar-like description, interpretation of texts, just slightly extending the scope of analysis beyond the frames of the sentence. This was probably due to the intent to provide a new level of linguistic representation, one that was higher in its scope than that of syntax in linguistic theory. Text linguistics as formulated in the 80s of the last century, this way, was basically a part of the systemic description of language. It may be stated, in view of the later developments of the field, that the early period of modern text linguistics concentrated on outlining frameworks to describe what now can be called the connexity, that is, the primarily grammatically relatedbodyof knowledgeof texts, or at bestwhat at the timewas called ‘locally based cohesion’. Therewere a number of models developedwith this scope, but perhaps yours and that of Halliday and Hasan were the most influential ones. As amatter of fact, the earlymodelswere at the timeunable to grasp the textual norms of coherence, the role of world knowledge and what has been called ‘common ground’ by Herbert Clark. How do you see, interpret the process of the development of the discipline from the early stages, frompurely and strictly linguistically based descriptions of texts to the present daymodels of textology,