From Text Grammar to Critical Discourse Analysis.pdf

From Text Grammar to Critical Discourse Analysis A brief academic autobiography Version 2.0. August 2004 Teun A. van Dijk Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona In this brief ‘academic autobiography’ I sketch some of the developments of my work from ‘text grammar’ in the early 1970s, to my present studies in ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ (CDA), and other areas of investigation, such as the study of ideology, knowledge and context. The focus of this autobiography is on ‘academic’. There are very few personal events mentioned in this text, some of which may explain some of the changes in my academic interests, such as my growing interest in racist and critical issues as from the 1980s. However, such a more personal story need to be told elsewhere. Text Grammar To understand my interest in text grammars it should be recalled that my first academic love was literary theory. After a first degree in French Language and Literature, with special interest in Surrealist poetry, at the (protestant) Free University of Amsterdam, I also studied Literary Theory, at the (City) University of Amsterdam. In that study I especially focused on literary language, and wanted to know whether literature could be characterized specifically by its typical use of language. Under the influence of Chomsky’s Transformational-Generative Grammar, such a question at the end of the 1960s was phrased in terms of a special set of rules that would ‘generate’ (that is, structurally describe) literary texts. However, TG-Grammar never was developed to account for text structures, and thus my aim to develop a ‘generative poetics’, reflected in my first book publications in Dutch (Van Dijk, 1971a, 1971b – some of which was later translated into German and Italian; see the References below for details), was soon replaced by the more important aim to focus on a ‘generative text grammar.’ This would become the topic of my