I. Media discourse as the object of linguistic analysis.

General notions and concepts of media discourse

Outline

Intro

I. Media discourse as the object of linguistic analysis.

II. Main notions

III. Forms of media

IV. The structure of a typical magazine article. Schematic view.

Conclusions

References

Questions

Introduction

Even though contemporary media has a massive influence on the way we act in our everyday life, in our country the linguistic research into this influence has remained relatively insignificant. In this lecture you will get a chance to know and understand better the ways and methods through which media can achieve the influence on the public. Quite often this influence remains unnoticed by ordinary members of the public. Yet media shapes the way we see the world around us. To illustrate this sort of influence I would ask you first of all to watch this short video [ will be shown in class ] and bear in mind the “distorted” picture of the world shown here until the end of the course.

I. Media discourse as the object of linguistic analysis.

Media discourse is a multidisciplinary field. In addition to extensive interest in media and cultural studies, it is the subject of scrutiny in linguistics – particularly conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. This diversity of approaches is both a strength and a weakness when you research media discourse. It also caused a number of different methodologies when accessing media discourse. In order to be able to understand the nature and the specific features of media texts researchers use an interdisciplinary approach when studying them.

Very few of us, if any, are unaffected by media discourse. The importance of the media in the modern world is incontrovertible. For some sections of society, at least, the media have largely replaced older institutions (such as the Church, or trade unions) as the primary source of understanding of the world. Since discourse plays a vital role in constituting people’s realities, the implications for the power and influence of media discourse are clear. Moreover, in modern democracies the media serve a vital function as a public forum. In principle, journalists are committed to democratic principles in relation to the government, hence to provision of a diversity of sources of opinion about it – a function (highly) idealized as the provision of ‘a robust, uninhibited, and wide-open marketplace of ideas, in which opposing views may meet, contend, and take each other’s measure’. Everyday engagement with media, then, is hugely significant and a theoretical understanding of this engagement is crucial (Talbot 2007:9).

By its nature media discourse is secondary, it is generated on the basis of various primary discoursive practices. The ethical values of the society are reflected in media discourse, and these values and attitudes are expressed through specific lingual means, such as conceptual metaphors, intertextual components, and national stereotypes. In any community media represent and influence the attitude of speakers to the language, media can tell a lot about the social meanings and stereotypes projected through language and communication, media represent and influence the formation and the expression of culture, politics and social life. A broader social influence of the media consists in their ability to not only selectively represent the world, but also in the social identities and cultural values they entail.

The main function of media discourse is the influence on the audience through meaningful and evaluative information. Contemporary Western communication is characterized by the tendency to a conflict-free dialogue, to conduct which the interlocutors must be able to create numerous implicit senses. A media text is an “ideological iceberg” where only its top is above the surface, and the bigger part of the text is expressed not directly, but taking into account the speakers’ basic background knowledge. The indirect method of providing information enables the author of a media text to distance him/herself from the subject of the article, thus creating an impression of impartiality.

Media discourse is the message together with all the other components of communication – the sender of the message, the recipient, the channel, the feedback, the message itself, the processes of coding and decoding and the speech situation or the context. According to Mary Talbot, a media text is conceived as a tissue of voices, traces of other texts, and when we engage with it, we go into dialogue with them. In studying media texts we have to be aware that they are dialogic, or embedded in a mesh of intertextuality. When we look at the communication that emanate from mass media, we see that, like most other forms of speaking, they are preceded and succeeded by numerous other dialogues and pieces of language that both implicate them and render them interpretable. Such is the social life of language … indexically linked to past and future speech event (Spitulnik 1997:161-162).

Media discourse is often considered to be a type of mediated quasi-interaction (vs. face-to-face interaction or mediated interaction), as there is a separation of contexts of its constitution and consumption, the have an extended availability in time and space, the range of symbolic cues is narrowed, it is oriented towards an indefinite range of potential recipients. The ‘quasi’ interaction is determined by the fact that as such there is no interaction, media discourse is not reciprocal, in fact only the sender is taking an active part in the interaction, while the recipient’s role is passive, s/he cannot actively influence it.

A significant characteristic of contemporary media is the inner conflict between the desire to inform and to entertain the recipient. As a result media authors try to more and more employ additional ways to grab the attention of the recipients in order to be competitive in the media world. This causes the greater complexity of media texts, the use of unexpected imagery or ironic style in language, and leads to the constant development in technological ways to attract the attention of the recipient.

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