8 Social Cognition and Discourse

The social psychology of discourse is a new field of study that partly overlaps with the social psychology of language, dealt with in the other chapters of this handbook. This means that this single chapter deals with topics that have received less attention in the social psychology of language, such as specific structures and strategies of discourse (excluding grammatical or other properties of sentences) and those issues in social psychology that can most fruitfully be studied from a discourse analytical perspective. Despite having its roots in some 2000 years of rhetoric, discourse analysis as an independent cross-discipline in the humanities and the social sciences has emerged only since the mid-1960s. Developing at the same time as, and sometimes in close relation to, other new disciplines, such as semiotics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, its primary parent-disciplines were ethnography, linguistics, microsociology and poetics. In the 1970s, cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence joined the disciplines in which increasing interest in discourse constituted one of the major new developments of the last decade (for details, see van Dijk, 1985b). The extension to the social psychology of discourse only took place in the 1980s (for recent discussions, see, e.g., Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Robinson, 1985). There are virtually no books in social psychology that feature concepts such as discourse or text in their subject index, and there are very few journal articles in the field that explicitly deal with discourse structures. This means that this chapter will not be able to review a large body of social psychological research that explicitly deals with discourse structures, although I take the liberty to reinterpret severa