Reviewed by Andy Van Drom, Université Laval, Canada

Bringing together fifteen years of work on critical discourse analysis in nine chapters (six previously published), Theo van Leeuwen develops the concept that any discourse, however abstract, can be interpreted as recontextualized social practice.

Departing from the thesis that discourses are social cognitions that can be—and indeed are— used as resources for representing social practices in text, Ch. 1, ‘Discourse as the recontextualisation of social practice’ (3–22), lays out the theoretical foundation of the book, and identifies the ten elements that form the building blocks of any social practice. These elements are: (i) a set of actions performed in a sequence that is fixed to a greater or lesser degree; (ii) the performance modes that are the ‘stage directions’ for the different sequences; (iii) a set of participants in certain roles; (iv) the participants’ eligibility conditions; (v) the participants’ presentation styles; (vi) the time; (vii) the location; (viii) eligibility conditions for the location; (ix) resources, tools, and materials needed to perform a given practice; and (x) the resources’ eligibility conditions. The author explains how a recontextualization chain acts as a filter for these elements and leaves discursive traces that are explicit to a greater or lesser degree. This is said to be the result of the transformations (e.g. substitution, deletion, rearrangement, addition) that the recontextualization process inflicts on discourse. The remaining chapters provide examples and evidence for these claims.

Ch. 2, ‘Representing social actors’ (23–54), investigates how the participants in social practices can be represented in English discourse. The author examines how participant roles are allocated and develops a sociosemantic network that brings social representation (e.g. nomination, agency) together with linguistic realization (e.g. nominalization, passive agent deletion). Ch. 3, ‘Representing social action’ (55–74), originally written as a companion paper to Ch. 2, draws on examples from the same text to present a parallel sociosemantic analytical network that focuses on actions rather than actors.

In Ch. 4, ‘Time in discourse’ (75–87), the author describes the semiotic resources used for representing the timing of social practices. He maintains a clear distinction between location (i.e. the point in time) and extent (i.e. the duration of an action), and pays special attention to the way time of different practices is managed and synchronized. Ch. 5, ‘Space in discourse’ (88–104), investigates how space (including natural and constructed lay-out) is realized, focusing on the difference between objective and subjective space (the latter being related to the actor’s point of view).

Ch. 6, ‘The discursive construction of legitimation’ (105–23), and Ch. 7, ‘The discursive construction of purpose’ (124–35), deal with the additions that can result from the recontextualization  process—namely, legitimation and purpose, which are not inherent to social actions but rather are discursively constructed.

The last two chapters apply the social actor theory to the field of visual communication. Ch. 8, ‘The visual representation of social actors’ (136–48), looks at how people—and more specifically, ‘others’—are depicted in the Western media by measuring the social distance and relations that these images symbolize. Ch. 9, ‘Representing social actors with toys’ (149–62), which brings together the author’s expertise in critical discourse analysis and multimodal semiotics, continues the same line of inquiry by looking at toys (e.g. Playmobil) as a semiotic resource for representing social roles and identities in play. This final chapter, in which the author presents a fine application of the theoretical aspects developed in his earlier chapters, is the ultimate illustration of a framework that is explicit, methodical, and critically incisive.