Macrostructures

An Interdisciplinary Study of Global Structures in Discourse, Interaction, and Cognition

Teun A. van Dijk

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429655418
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychologie
• Categoria: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Macrostructures are higher-level semantic or conceptual structures that organize the 'local' microstructures of discourse, interaction, and their cognitive processing. They are distinguished from other global structures of a more schematic nature, which we call superstructures. Originally published in 1980, the theory of macrostructures outlined in this book is the result of research carried out during the previous 10 years in the domains of literary theory, text grammar, the general theory of discourse, pragmatics, and the cognitive psychology of discourse processing. The presentation of the theory is systematic but informal and at this stage was not intended to be fully formalized.

1 The Concept of Macrostructure

1.1. Intuitive Notions of Macrostructure

1.1.1. The aim of this book is to present a systematic analysis of so-called global structures that play a role in several disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. Many different terms have been used to denote various kinds of such global structures. In the following chapters, we try to make explicit the notions of global structure involved in the study of discourse, (inter-)action, and cognition. It is necessary to look first at the intuitive concepts and terms handled by language users, as social participants in the interpretation, categorization, and communication of global structures. One of the empirical goals of a theory of global structures is an account of how people show their awareness of such structures by talking about them or by other kinds of metabehavior. Of course, this does not mean that the underlying cognitive processes and representations involved are always ‘conscious.’ Thus, much of the empirical evidence for the cognitive reality of global structures will have to be assessed in more indirect ways. Nevertheless, there is a sound development in the social sciences to take into account, or even to start from, the explicit indications exhibited by social participants of the ways they interpret and categorize their cognitive and social reality.¹ Initially, the social scientists will have access only to this kind of intuition, of their own and of their social coparticipants, and the ways it is expressed.

There is a more general methodological principle that we shall follow in this book, and it is related to the one indicated above. Whatever the more specific linguistic or sociological concepts of global structures may be, we shall assume that they have a cognitive basis. Thus, language use and behavior may be accounted for in independent theories, but these theories will ultimately be based on a theory of how language users and social participants perceive, interpret, know, memorize, evaluate, plan, produce, etc., their discourses and interactions. In other words, our social behavior—including our communicative verbal interaction—is determined by our interpretations and representations of social “reality.” Later chapters show that global structures are the result of very fundamental cognitive principles operating in the ways we process this kind of highly complex information from the social situation.

This fundamentally cognitive approach to the study of global structures should be qualified. Although the basic principles involved in complex information processing are of a cognitive nature, at the same time language use and interaction require an account of their social properties. Thus, the cognitive processes and representations involved do not arbitrarily vary over individuals but are in turn determined by (our knowledge of) social interaction and social structure, in a similar way as cognition develops as a function of biophysiological properties of the organism. Hence, when speaking of the foundations of language use and interaction, we should use the notion of social cognition to account for the fact that our interpretations and representations in this area are essentially conventional:² The categories and rules we manipulate are developed under the constraints of all kinds of communicative interaction and cooperation. We have justified beliefs that most other participants use similar categories and rules in most social situations, and such beliefs will even be used to normalize our cognitive processes and representations.³ We come back to these properties of social cognition in Chapter 4 in our analysis of global structures in action and interaction. Our point here is that global structures are cognitively based but that the cognitive principles involved develop under social constraints—even if it is obvious that such social constraints again require cognitive interpretation and representation in order to play a functional role in cognitive development.

1.1.2. With these methodological principles in mind, we may now try to spell out our intuitive understanding of the concept of “global structure” and the ways we denote such structures with terms of natural language.

Our intuitive notion of global structure, first of all, is relative. We discern, interpret, and talk about such structures by distinguishing them from what we call local structures. The clearest manifestation of this distinction appears in the conceptual opposition of whole versus part, which is used in a large number of cognitive activities, from perception⁴ to discourse and interaction; that is, we are able to see, treat, interpret, or use many objects or phenomena as “wholes,” as cognitive units of some kind, with respect to the various “members,” “parts,” “sections,” or “elements” of these whole objects. Hence, we take global structures to be a kind of (w)holistic structure, and we say that the parts, members, etc., “make up,” “constitute,” “form,” or “compose” them. The intuitive “unity” of a whole then will be determined in terms of spatiotemporal continuity and its cognitive correlates (e.g., coherence) and externally by its distinction from and substitutivity with respect to other (whole) objects. Similarly, a part will be seen, interpreted, used, etc., as an object, property, etc., of another object, even if it may be identified for itself and in relation to other parts of the same whole object. Without analyzing the various properties of parts and wholes further, we assume here that the part-whole relation is an intuitive primitive, which cannot be analyzed into more basic cognitive notions. This relation may show itself in various ways, however, as we have seen, viz., as element-set, member-class, or part-whole.

The distinction between global and local structures should also be construed along another intuitive dimension, that of point of view, that is, we not only have objects or phenomena for which a distinction is made between their parts and their whole but at the same time this distinction may be projected in our cognitive manipulation of such objects. Thus, we may see, look at, focus upon, think of, etc., either the parts or the whole, depending on the “point of view” we take with respect to the object.

One way of showing this point-of-view dimension of the local-global distinction appears in perceptual and cognitive distance. We tend to see an object as a whole when looking from farther away than when we look at its parts. The intuitive notion of detail plays a role here: Parts of the whole are distinguished as details when we have a closer look at the object, whereas from a more distant point of view individual details may no longer be perceptible. In the latter case only larger parts or outlines of the object may be visible.

There is a slightly different way of formulating this intuitive distinction, in terms of levels. Instead of saying that we see, interpret, focus upon, etc., a certain object from a certain distance, we may also say that we do all this on various levels, a more specific or particular level, and a more general or abstract level, respectively. In this case the details of the lower, more specific level may be said to be “ignored” at the higher, more general level. From this particular intuitive distinction between global and local structures we see for the first time that the relation between these structures may take the form of certain cognitive operations, of generalization or abstraction on the one hand and of specification or particularization on the other hand. From the various intuitive ways of accounting for the global-local distinction in cognitive information processing, we later take this notion of level as our maj or starting point. One reason for this strategy is that in the social sciences and their philosophical foundations the notion of level is theoretically well-established: Similar to the intuitive level of “seeing” things, we have the theoretical notion of level of description. We shall also discover that not only for scientific discourse but also for everyday discourse we may speak of different levels of description.

Related to the other notions discussed so far, we finally have the important intuitive distinction based on the dimension of relevance. In this case, the parts or details of the lower, more specific levels are associated with the notion of a lower degree of relevance or importance, whereas the larger parts, the whole, at a more general level are associated with higher degrees of relevance or importance. Thus, details may be abstracted because at a higher level they are less important. Other notions, such as “crucial” or “central”, may in that case be used in order to qualify the more general and important levels.

1.1.3. Let us now make these various intuitive manifestations of the local versus global distinction more concrete by giving examples from the various domains we are concerned with in this book. The general domain is that of cognition and in particular that of complex information processing. The more specific domains, both linked to that of cognition, are that of language use and discourse on the one hand and that of action and interaction on the other hand.⁵ The choice of these last two domains is not arbitrary. First of all, they represent two fundamental cognitive functions of the human organism. Second, language and discourse are inherently linked with social action and interaction: When we speak or write, we accomplish certain kinds of social acts, viz. speech acts, which play an important role in social interaction. In both cases complex information processing is involved, and it will be assumed that such complex information processing is not possible without the theoretical and cognitive distinction between local and global structures.

First of all, language use manifests itself in utterances that, as object types, we interpret as discourses or texts of a certain natural language. If more than one speaker is involved in the production of such utterances, we speak of a dialogue or conversation. The theoretical analysis of discourse is the object of analysis in Chapter 2. What we are concerned with here is the fact that language users implicitly and explicity make a distinction between local and global structures of discourse. On the one hand they speak of the details of what was said, on the other hand they use such notions as theme, topic, gist, upshot, or point to characterize the discourse, or larger fragments of it, as a whole. Thus, words and sentences are seen as the parts of the discourse, and the theme or topic is seen as a property of the whole. When people talk about such a theme or topic, at the same time they imply that details of the discourse are disregarded or abstracted from this account at a more general level: “I don’t remember exactly what he said, but the upshot (his point) was… ”At the same time these notions intuitively associate with that of relevance or importance: The point is the more relevant, important, central, prominent, or crucial aspect of what was said.

In these examples of notions used in everyday speech to denote global properties of discourse, we observe that the notions mainly pertain to the meaning or content of the discourse and not to the style of expression, the ordering of discourse parts, etc. This means that this kind of notion should be made explicit in semantic terms; to distinguish them from other kinds of global structures, we talk about semantic global structures. It is this type of structure that we try to make explicit in this book in terms of (semantic) macrostructures.

1.1.4. Besides these semantic global structures we also use terms to denote global structures of discourse and conversation that have a more schematic nature. In that case it is not the global meaning but rather a global schema that is involved, a schema that may be used to order or to assign other structures to the global meanings of the discourse. Notions such as outline, construction, order, and buildup are used in such cases. Schematic structures of this kind may be of a categorical type (i.e., built up in terms of conventional categories, just as a sentence is built up from syntactic categories). Examples of such schematic global structures are the narrative structure of a story, the argumentative structure of a lecture, or the specific schematic ordering of a psychological paper. In all those cases we also have intuitive terms in order to denote some of the categories involved, such as introduction, setting, background, development, and conclusion. To distinguish schematic global structures, which pertain to the global “form” of the discourse, from the global meaning structures for which notions such as “theme,” “topic,” or “gist” are used, we use the specific theoretical term superstructures.⁶ In Chapter 3 we try to establish the various links between these two sorts of global structures (i.e., between semantic macrostructures and schematic superstructures).

1.1.5. Utterances may be studied not only as manifestations of discourse but also as manifestations of social actions, as speech acts. Both in monologue and in conversation this may involve a sequence of speech acts. Also at this level, which is the object of the discipline of pragmatics, it makes sense to distinguish between local and global structures. The local structure pertains to the individual speech acts and their connections, whereas the global structure pertains to the sequence of speech acts as a whole. Also here we use intuitive terms such as the point or upshot of what was said, or rather done, though not referring to some global meaning but instead to the globalspeech act being performed. Thus, we may locally perform an assertion, followed by a request, but with a whole sequence of (possibly different) speech acts we may also globally perform the speech act of a request, an assertion, or a threat (e.g., in a request letter, a lecture, or a ransom note). In other words, the global structures at this pragmatic level of analysis pertain to the global functions of the utterance. Language users have intuitions about such global pragmatic structures. Thus, for instance in conversation, they may know that, as a whole, the speech acts of the speaker may add up, come down to, or function as a global request or threat. Again, we disregard details and underline the most relevant or important aspect of the utterance when we say that what he essentially did was to promise something.

1.1.6. Via the notion of speech act and that of global speech act we may now look for more or less similar intuitive distinctions made by social participants between local and global structures in action and interaction in general. The distinction makes sense only if we again take on the one hand a sequence of actions and decide whether the sequence as a whole has certain properties. This is the case in all examples of higher-order actions, that is, actions that are performed, as a whole, by performing a sequence of other actions. Many social actions are of this kind, such as taking a train, eating in a restaurant, or going shopping. Such stereotypical social episodes are analyzed later in terms of frames or scripts. We also have global actions that are not inherently social, such as taking breakfast (alone), taking a bath, or repairing one’s car. Essential for our discussion here is that social participants are able to handle complex sequences of actions as one global action, that is, they speak about such actions and interpret sequences as one action. The same holds for global interactions: A conversation itself is a case in point, and the same may be said for other...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Concept of Macrostructure
• 2. Macrostructures in Discourse
• 3. Macrostructures and Superstructures
• 4. Macrostructures in Action and Interaction
• 5. Pragmatic Macrostructures
• 6. Macrostructures and Cognition
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index