ABSTRACT
At the outset, Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch present a list of 'cognitive' and 'contextual assumptions' that 'inspire the major theoretical notions and components of the model' and indicate its 'relationships with other models'. Against much of linguistics, van Dijk and Kintsch assert that 'the strategy types of largest scope' are the 'most fundamental to understanding' 'language' and 'semiotic practices', as well as 'interactions, events, and objects'. For van Dijk and Kintsch, 'the actual production of discourse begins' with a 'plan' that has both 'pragmatic and semantic representations'. Van Dijk and Kintsch also 'take propositions for granted as theoretical units of a cognitive model' and 'formulate' 'typical psychological operations and 'strategies for reconstructing' them. Van Dijk and Kintsch recommend 'limiting the textbase to information expressed or implied by text', while other 'activated knowledge' goes into 'the situation model with which the textbase is continuously compared'. Thus, van Dijk and Kintsch's model is much concerned with 'stylistic and rhetorical' aspects.
