Current Issues In Language and Society
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Volume: 2 Number: 2 Page: 115–145
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Discourse, Opinions and Ideologies
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Teun A. Van Dijk
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Theories of discourse and ideologies should not be reduced to any partial discipline. This is also true for the cognitive aspects of ideologies, which cannot simply be accounted for in terms of their manifestation
or use in text and talk. We need complex theories which link discourse, cognition and society in order to apply the notion of ideology explicitly as well as critically. Ideologies are conceived as basic
systems of shared social representations that may control more specific group beliefs (knowledge, attitudes),and influence models via the instantiation of such beliefs in concrete models of situations and
experiences. Ideologies themselves have to be inferred from more directly observable structures of cognition, interaction and society. For this reason, the paper sets out to show the linkage between opinions,
attitudes and ideologies and to look for ways of explaining variation in opinions as well as in shared social dimensions of evaluative beliefs (attitudes). This is elucidated using a sample text.
© Multilingual Matters 1998
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