Van Dijk presented here a new theory of context to explain how the texts and conversations adapt to their context or social environment. Instead of the direct relationship usually established between society and discourse, the author argues instead that what is given is an indirect influence and it depends on how the users 'define' the communicative situation in which they are immersed. The new concept introduced Van Dijk for these definitions is that of context models. These models control the entire production and language comprehension and explain how discourse is constructed as appropriate in each situation. These models are the missing link between language and society, and has been ignored so far by both pragmatic as sociolinguistics. In this interdisciplinary book, the new theory of context is developed from the perspective of social psychology, sociology and anthropology .. The theory is applied to the domain of politics, including the debate over the war in Iraq, where speeches of political leaders constitute a case study for a thorough contextual analysis. In another book published by Gedisa, Speech and Context, Teun A. van Dijk presents a multidisciplinary theory of context and how context influences speech and language use, with a special focus on the notion of context in linguistics systemic, cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics.