TEUN A. VAN DIJK is Professor of Discourse Studies in the Department of

Translation and Philology at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. He has

edited Discourse Studies (2007) and Racism at the Top (co-edited with Ruth

Wodak, 2000) and is the author of Racism and Discourse in Spain and Latin

America (2005) and Ideology (1998).

Van Dijk presents a new theory of context that explains how text and

talk are adapted to their social environment. He argues that instead of the

usual direct relationship being established between society and discourse,

this influence is indirect and depends on how language users themselves

define the communicative situation. The new concept van Dijk introduces for

such definitions is that of context models. These models control all language

production and understanding and explain how discourse is made appropriate

in each situation. They are the missing link between language and society so

far ignored in pragmatics and sociolinguistics. In this interdisciplinary book,

the new theory of context is developed by examining the analysis of the

structure of social situations in social psychology and sociology and their

cultural variation in anthropology. The theory is applied to the domain of

politics, including the debate about the war in Iraq, where political leaders’

speeches serve as a case study for detailed contextual analysis. In another book

published by Cambridge University Press, Discourse and Context, Teun A.

van Dijk presents the (socio)linguistic and cognitive foundations of this

multidisciplinary theory of context and the way context influences language

use and discourse.