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strategies of discourse comprehension

teun a van dijk & walter kintsch


general framework for understanding discourse


overview of the model

levels of language use:

(but these various models interact in intricate ways)

strategic analysis depends not only on textual characteristics, but also on characteristics of the user (e.g. their goals, world knowledge); as such, the standards of beauty applied might also depend on these characteristics? even though it’s always about the same material.

strategies are the procedural knowledge we have about understanding discourse.

understanding is the semantic (but also actionable) representation of the input discourse in episodic memory.

the difference between intentional (meaning, what it is conceptually) and extensional (referential, what it is practically)

strategies (things deploy to better realize the goal: understanding):

Rhetorical strategies do not lead to the construction of semantic representation, but they help in this process. Figures of speech may attract attention to important concepts, provide more cues for local and global coherence, suggest plausible pragmatic interpretations (e.g., a promise versus a threat), and will in general assign more structure to elements of the semantic representation, so that retrieval is easier.

questions: - are there different strategies from a listener point of view, and a speaker point of view? - are there non-verbal cues in programming?

production strategies aka undertstanding of a discourse also needs to be activated.