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C. Discourse and Context
Context refers to the situation giving rise to the discourse and within which the discourse is embedded Nunan, 1993: 7-8. There are two types of
context: linguistic context and non-linguistic context. The linguistic context is the language that surrounds or accompanies the piece of discourse. The non-
linguistic context is within which the discourse takes place. It includes the types of communicative event, the topic, the purpose of the event, the setting,
the participants, and the background knowledge underlying the communicative event.
According to van Dijk 2008: 4 context is whenever we want to indicate that some phenomenon, event, action or discourse needs to be seen or studied
in relationship to its situation, that is, its surrounding conditions and consequences. Thus, it describes and also explains the occurrence or
properties of some focal phenomenon in terms of some aspects of its context. Contextual assumptions affect how someone understand language, and
that context of speech has to be better understood to develop realistic theories of language and of language learning Ervin-Tripp, 1996: 21. Therefore, the
researcher needs to consider the context of the situation in order to have a better understanding in analyzing the language used by the criminal defense
lawyer character in the Lincoln lawyer novel.
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D. Discourse Structure
Discourse structures always have the double function of enacting or executing underlying ideologies on the one hand and on the other hand, of
acting as a more or less powerful means of persuasion, that is, as a strategic means to influence preferred mental models, and indirectly preferred attitudes
and ideologies. It is in this latter way that the formation, change and challenge of ideologies are a function of discourse structure van Dijk, 1996: 143.
The point of ideological discourse analysis is not merely to discover underlying ideologies, but it is also used to discover systematically link
structures of discourse with structures of ideologies. One does not need to be a discourse analyst to conclude that a news report, textbook fragment or
conversation is conservative, sexist or environmentalist. Our naive knowledge of language, discourse, society and ideologies usually allows us to make such
inferences rather reliably van Dijk, 2004: 5. A more analytically explicit study of discourse, however, need to spell out such intuitions, and to specify
what expressions or the meanings of discourse give rise to what kind of inferences or other mental steps.
1. Macrostructure
In a theory of discourse the notion of macrostructure is used to account for the various notions of global meaning, such as topic, theme, or gist van
Dijk, 1980: 10. It means that Macrostructure focused on the global meaning which emphasizes more on the meaning or the topic of the discourse. It is
described by van Dijk 2004: 100 as follows.
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“Macro-structures are further required in order to make explicit the semantic relations between a discourse and its possible summaries.
Thus, it is assumed that a summary is a verbal expression of a macro- structure of the discourse it summarizes
”.
a. Topics
Ideological content is most directly expressed in discourse meaning. Then, someone shall pay special attention to the semantics of ideological
discourse. Since the meaning of words, sentences and whole discourses are extraordinarily complex, the researcher have to make a selection of its most
relevant aspects. However, the meaning of discourse is not limited to the meaning of its words and sentences. Discourse also has more global
meanings, such as topics. Such topics represent the gist or most important information of a discourse, and tell us what a discourse is about.
Topics typically are the information that is best recalled of a discourse. Although the topics abstractly characterize the meaning of a whole discourse
or of a larger fragment of discourse, they may also be concretely formulated in the text itself, for instance in summaries, abstracts, titles or headlines.
The ideological functions of topics directly follow the general principles mentioned above: if someone wants to emphasize self-good things or others-
bad things, the first thing they do is topicalizing such information. Conversely, if someone wants to de-emphasize self-bad things and others-
good things, then they need to de-topicalize such information. For instance, in much public discourse in multicultural society this means that topics
associated with racism are much less topicalized than those related to the
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