Language, Media and Culture

The Key Concepts

Martin Montgomery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138047051
• eBook ISBN: 9781351018807
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Language, Media and Culture: The Key Concepts is an authoritative and indispensable guide to the essential terminology of the overlapping fields of Language, Media and Culture. Designed to give students and researchers 'tools for thinking with' in addressing major issues of communicative change in the 21st century, the book covers over 500 concepts as well as containing an extensive bibliography to aid further study. Subjects covered include:

• Authenticity
• Truthiness
• Structures of feeling
• Turn-taking
• Transitivity
• Validity claims

With cross referencing and further reading provided throughout, this book provides an inclusive map of the discipline, and is an essential reference work for students in communication, media, journalism and cultural studies, as well as for students of language and linguistics.

Language, Media and Culture

The Key Concepts

accent n. SOCIOLINGUISTICS. Distinctive ways of pronouncing the sounds of a language associated with membership of a particular social group defined by reference to region and/or social class. Most languages are subject to some kind of regional variation in pronunciation, and the more widely dispersed the language the greater is the likelihood of accent variation. Thus, the French of Quebec sounds to a native speaker quite different from the French of Paris; and Portuguese as spoken in Brazil sounds quite different to a native speaker of Portuguese as spoken in Portugal. English is something of an extreme example in this respect since it has a range of different accents which are associated with a distinctive national affiliation: hence, for example, Irish, Indian, American, Nigerian and Australian accents of English. But accent variation does not, of course, stop at this level of differentiation. In the case of British English, for example, there is a whole spectrum of internal variation ranging from regionally marked rural and urban accents (such as Somerset, Scouse or Geordie), through to that pattern referred to as Received Pronunciation (RP), commonly heard on the BBC’s World Service, amongst the judiciary, in public schools and so on. In this sense, all speakers have ‘an accent’, including habitual users of Received Pronunciation. And although this latter accent is now primarily a class-based accent, it is important to note that historically it once had strong regional affiliations with the area south-east of the English Midlands. Its specific promotion through, for example, the English public schools in the 19th century, and the BBC in the early phases of sound broadcasting helps to explain its social ascendancy today in the UK, where it now seems to be the neutral or unmarked accent of English to such an extent that it becomes identified with the ‘natural’ and ‘right’ way of speaking the language. It is probably now the most widely understood and spoken accent within the UK and until recently was an accent commonly adopted for teaching English as a foreign language. This does not, however, make RP more correct as an accent of English than other patterns of pronunciation. It may command more prestige, but it is worth remembering that all accents attract social stigma and approval in varying measure from varying quarters. And, whilst experimental studies of reactions to accents within the UK have shown that RP speakers are rated more highly than regionally accented speakers in terms of general competence, these same studies have also shown that RP speakers emerge less favourably than regionally accented speakers on scales of personal integrity and social attractiveness. Such judgements ultimately have a social rather than a linguistic basis. Judgements of the correctness and aesthetic appeal of particular patterns of pronunciation are similarly difficult to justify by reference to intrinsic properties of the sounds themselves. They are strongly motivated – if unconsciously – by social factors. => ACCESSED VOICES, DIALECT. Further reading Foulkes, P. and Docherty, G (Eds.) (1999) Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. London: Arnold.

access n. JOURNALISM & MEDIA STUDIES. The degree to which channels of mass communication are open to an individual or a group. The vast majority of the world’s population have either very limited access, or none at all. The powerful and the official, the celebrated and the connected, especially in the Western world, have privileged access to agents such as newspaper and television journalists to help to disseminate their personal views, most often in the support of the status quo. Their entrée to mass communication has been characterised as having accessed voices. => ACCESSED VOICES, MASS COMMUNICATION.

accessed voices np. pl. JOURNALISM STUDIES, MEDIA STUDIES, MASS COMMUNICATION. Those people in a society who are given easy access to mainstream media, especially members of the power elite – experts, politicians, celebrities – who are not necessarily representative of society as a whole. => ACCESS, MASS COMMUNICATION.

accountability/accountability interview n./np. BROADCAST TALK, CONVERSATION ANALYSIS, DISCOURSE STUDIES, JOURNALISM STUDIES. Quality of being held liable or responsible for the accuracy, rightness or appropriateness of one’s actions and/or words. Inasmuch as the press, broadcasting and the media constitute a sphere through which and in which the public can scrutinise the actions or performance of government – or the powerful more generally – they constitute an important means of holding elite figures to account. This is the basic premise of the work by Habermas on the public sphere, notions of the Fourth Estate or the idea behind the commonly used phrase ‘speaking truth to power’. In practice, it has led to the development of specific genres of discourse in the media that rehearse precisely the aim of holding public figures to account, one of these being the widely adopted use of the current affairs interview to interrogate the actions, words or motives of establishment figures. Well-known interviewers become celebrated for their ability to put difficult questions to interviewees, acting in this way like ‘tribunes of the people’. In current affairs interviews of this type public figures are made accountable in relation to a relevant news event or topic of the moment for their own words or deeds or for the actions /statements of the institution with which they are associated. => ALIGNMENT, FIFTH ESTATE, FOURTH ESTATE, INTERVIEW, PUBLIC SPHERE. Further reading Clayman, S. and Heritage (2002); Montgomery (2007)

active audience np. MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES. Emphasises the role of the audience in responding to the media. The meanings of media texts do not lie totally within the texts themselves. Instead, audiences make sense of and use the media within social and personal contexts and are not passive recipients of media messages. => ENCODING/DECODING, INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES, OPEN TEXT. Further reading Fiske, J. (1987) Ch. 5.

actuality n. FILM STUDIES, JOURNALISM STUDIES. Film footage of real events, places, persons or things which can provide the raw material for documentary films or news reports. => DOCUMENTARY, NEWS.

adaptation n. FILM STUDIES, LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES. A screen version – usually film or television – of a work previously published as prose fiction – usually a novel or short-story. From the earliest days of cinema it has been common to use novels as story material for film, with Dickens being a particularly popular author for screen adaptation. Well over half of Hollywood films are based on previously published prose fiction that has been adapted for screen. Critical attention, however, tends to focus on adaptation of classic fiction by authors such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Dickens, rather than, for example, J.K. Rowling or Ian Fleming. => FILM LANGUAGE, NARRATIVE. Further reading Hutcheon, L. (with Siobhan O’Flynn) (2012)

address n. DISCOURSE STUDIES; MEDIA STUDIES. => MODES OF ADDRESS.

adjacency pair np. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS, LINGUISTICS, SOCIOLOGY. Conversational exchange between speakers consisting of two parts (thus, a ‘pair’ of utterances) in which the occurrence of the first part of the pair predicts or requires the production of an appropriate second part of the pair. Typical adjacency pairs are ‘question’ followed by ‘answer’, or a ‘greeting’ followed by a ‘greeting’. The concept of adjacency pair, originally formulated by the U.S. sociologist, Harvey Sacks (1935-1975), was the first step to describing some of the structural and sequential constraints that underpin coherent talk. The term is widely used in the study of conversation and, more generally, in the analysis of talk-in-interaction. => COHERENCE, CONVERSATION, TALK-IN-INTERACTION, SPEECH ACTS. Further reading Hutchby, I. and Woofit (2008); Levinson, S. (1983)

aesthetics n. pl. FILM STUDIES, LITERARY & CULTURAL STUDIES, PHILOSOPHY. Branch of philosophy devoted to elucidating the nature of beauty, especially in literature and the arts. In the 18th and early 19th centuries the emphasis within this field lay on describing how beauty was perceived and appreciated. Later the emphasis began to fall on how the qualities of a beautiful object could be defined in such a way as to distinguish what is beautiful from what is not; and this in turn led to an attempt to articulate the grounds of good taste, thereby making strong connections with the criticism, especially, of fine art, but also literature and music. In its later guises aesthetics could thus be seen as underpinning questions of value and judgment as these were deployed by different critical and artistic schools. As such, aesthetics often attempted to ground definitions of beauty ahistorically in relation to other transcendental terms such as goodness, truth, pleasure and complexity (or simplicity). Questions of aesthetic taste still attract significant interest; but judgements of this kind are increasingly considered to be socio-culturally determined and/or simple matters of personal preference, and therefore relative rather than absolute. Despite this, questions of aesthetic judgement refuse to disappear, remain interesting (e.g. in the form of ‘lists of the best’) and consequently provoke continuing reflection, not just in literature and the arts but also and increasingly within the domain of popular culture. => TASTE, VALUE. Further reading Eco, U. (2010)

affiliation n. JOURNALISM, SOCIOLOGY. Official relationship with an association or organisation, carrying special status or rights and obligations. The bearer of affiliated status is empowered to speak or act in some way for the organisation or association. In broadcast media, especially in the context of news and current affairs, speakers are selected on the basis of some kind of warrant, as witness, as expert, as public figure, as spokesperson, as correspondent. Many of these roles are based on an affiliated status which will be stated in their introduction or with an accompanying graphic, e.g. ‘Member of Parliament for Croydon East’. => ACCESS, ACCESSED VOICES. Further reading Thornborrow, J. (2015)

affordance/affordances n./n. pl. CULTURAL AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES, MEDIA, PSYCHOLOGY. A term derived from the work of the American psychologist, James J. Gibson (1904-1979). Gibson’s main interest was in visual perception, and he adopted the term in order to emphasise how our approach to the recognition or perception of material in the environment operates less in terms of an engagement with abstracted features such as size, shape or colour, and more in terms of utility: in other words, it is as if we approach the environment considering ‘what can this (particular thing) be used for?’ rather than ‘what is this?’ Some media scholars (Hutchby, 2001; Juris, 2012) have adopted the term to highlight qualitative differences between different technologies in terms of their differing potentialities for communication. The communicative affordances of a phone, for instance, are not the same as a VHF two-way radio (such as ‘walkie-talkie’, as used by established radio taxi cabs, emergency services and so-on.) The communicative technologies of writing, for example, consist of much more than techniques of committing agreed sets of symbols to a semi-durable medium. Considered in terms of their affordances, writing technologies (as compared, for example, with speech) allow for various kinds of time-space distantiation; they ‘afford’, or allow, writer and reader to be separated in time and space. They allow, for instance, for a uniform message to reach many readers, distributed across different contexts. They afford opportunities for interrupted and repetitive reception (the written text does not need to be read in its entirety on one occasion), and for working and re-working a message before, or even after, publication or transmission. The affordances of writing are, in this way, quite different than speech, at least in the pre-digital, pre-electronic era. Latterly, of course, analogue and digital recordi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• How to use this book
• List of key concepts
• The Key Concepts
• Bibliography
• Index