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Part I
Research frameworks and methods
Summarizing the field(s)
The chapters in Part I shed light on the approaches in terms of research paradigms, theories, methodologies, and methods developed and applied to investigate the interplay of language use, semiotic products, cultural routines, and media. The sequence of chapters takes the reader from language (Chapter 1) to its role as a window to social distinctions (2) and discourse structures and processes (3). Together, these three chapters explain the relevance of investigating language and discourse in media contexts. The other chapters focus on ways to do so: taking a critical perspective (4), plumbing cognitive depths (5), and exploring corpus-linguistic breadth (6). While the chapters differ in theoretical and methodological approaches, they all share the key assumption that the way we look at language in media contexts influences what we can find out about it â and what we cannot.
âą Medialinguistic approaches: exploring the case of newswriting
by Daniel Perrin
Chapter 1 illustrates key concepts and procedures from media linguistics through a case study of a news piece about demonstrations in Lebanon. After discussing the internal and external structure of media linguistics, the chapter draws links between the disciplinary perspectives and epistemic interests in newswriting research. Turning to methodological approaches, version, progression, variation, and metadiscourse analysis are identified as prototype examples and are used to argue for the development of sound multimethod approaches in future research.
âą Sociolinguistic approaches: variationist frameworks
by Jane Stuart-Smith
Chapter 2 questions the extent to which media influence language change, long an assumption by social theorists and many linguists. Beginning with a survey of theoretical and methodological approaches to sociolinguistics, highlighting the variationist framework, the chapter focuses on the Glasgow Media Project, which systematically studied the effect of televised representations of popular London accents on Glaswegian vernacular. The study showed that while the accent is changing, media has only a very limited role and that social context factors play a much stronger explanatory role.
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âą Discourse approaches: language in use and the multidisciplinary advantage
by Colleen Cotter and Diana ben-Aaron
Chapter 3 explores approaches to the study of media discourse in relation to language in society, focusing on context-based analytical approaches. The chapter outlines the historical development of media-language research through the paradigms of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, and systemic-functional linguistics before connecting them with their contemporary manifestations, highlighting practice and change. Through a discussion of traditional news transmission, form, and remediation, the current and developing domains of blogs, micro-blogs, and live-text commentary are noted as areas for expanding study.
âą Critical approaches: media analysis in/and critical discourse studies
by MichaĆ KrzyĆŒanowski and David Machin
Chapter 4 extrapolates the major trends within Critical Discourse Studies. The dialectical-relational, discourse-historical, and social-semiotic approaches are identified as contemporary leaders in the field, making use of lexical and grammatical analysis, and representation of social actors and action. The analysis of genre, argumentation, and context are outlined as emergent complementary approaches, with examples of how discourse changes, shapes, and is shaped by society provided throughout.
âą Cognitive approaches: media, mind, and culture
by Anna Pleshakova
Chapter 5 provides insight into cognitive approaches to research on the public use of language. Studies of metaphor in media discourse are centralized to demonstrate how metaphors function in structuring sociocultural and political knowledge to influence public opinion. Cognitive approaches to multimodality, pragmatics, social cognition, and applied approaches to language research are also explored, while drawing out their sociopolitical implications.
âą Corpus approaches: investigating linguistic patterns and meanings
by Sylvia Jaworska
Chapter 6 assesses the benefits and limitations of corpus linguistic research methods. Using the Multilingualism in Public Discourse corpus, frequency, keyword, collocation, and concordance analysis procedures are demonstrated. Focusing on the benefits to media, two examples of corpus linguistic methods being used in research in language use and discursive representation are then discussed. The benefits of Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis and the limits of corpus approaches in multimodal and online research are acknowledged and identified for future development.
Recommended complementary reading
Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. London: Continuum. This publication is a comprehensive account of the use of corpus tools and methods in discourse analysis with lucid explanations and illustrative examples easy to digest by those with little or no corpus experience.
Charteris-Black, J. (2014). Analyzing political speeches: rhetoric, discourse and metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. The book examines political speeches from the perspective of critical metaphor analysis, while demonstrating the potential of integrating the latter with the other cognitive and critical linguistic approaches, as well as with the more traditional approaches to oratory and discourse.
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KrzyĆŒanowski, M. and Forchtner, B. (Eds.) (2016). Theoretical and conceptual challenges in critical discourse studies. Special Issue, Discourse & Society, 27, 3. London: Sage. This journal special issue gathers papers that explore the key current theoretical and conceptual challenges in Critical Discourse Studies. In the light of accelerating social and politico-economic dynamics, the collection offers a significant rethinking of the key conceptual foundations and of the theoretical apparatus of CDS.
Machin, D. and Mayr, A. (2012). How to do critical discourse analysis. London: Sage. This book comprises an accessible tool-kit approach to doing critical analysis of texts and images. Each chapter takes the reader through one set of tools, applying them to a range of different kinds of texts, such as newspapers, official documents, promotional material.
McEnery, T. and Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: method, theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This useful textbook introduces students to the key concepts and tools of Corpus Linguistics. Each section includes a range of practical tasks and questions to check studentsâ understanding of the discussed matters.
Musolff, A. and Zinken, J. (Eds.) (2009). Metaphor and discourse. Palgrave Macmillan. The volume presents the contributions by researchers analysing the construction and functioning of metaphor, as grounded in various types of discourses from the cognitive linguistic perspective.
Partington, A. et al. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse: theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Amsterdam: Benjamins. This book is an excellent introduction to the methodology of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies with many case studies investigating language use in the media.
Tannen, D. and Trester, A. (Eds.) (2013). Discourse 2.0: language and new media. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. This anthology focuses on a range of new media topics by key researchers.
van Dijk, T.A. (2014). Discourseâcognitionâsociety: Current state and prospects of the socio-cognitive approach to discourse. In C. Hart and P. Cap (Eds.), Contemporary studies in critical discourse analysis. London: Bloomsbury. The chapter offers a new (revised) application of the socio-cognitive research framework, while once again demonstrating the frameworkâs analytical and interpretative capacity.
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1
Medialinguistic approaches
Exploring the case of newswriting
Daniel Perrin
1.1 Introduction: toward public understanding
What is the role of language in a globally connected, multi-semiotic, and mediatized world? How do people use media to get their messages across? Why does news production change in increasingly multilingual environments? Answering such questions on empirical grounds requires medialinguistic approaches. Often, these approaches combine theories and methods from (applied) linguistics on the one hand and media and communication studies on the other. Moreover, media linguistic research tends to integrate practitionersâ views in transdisciplinary projects. Such endeavors result in systematic reflections of the value that findings can add to both theory and practice. Empirically based practical measures include coaching and advising journalists and media businesses in order to help them improve their writing processes and refine their policies.
In this chapter, I use an example from a study by my research team to illustrate key concepts and procedures of media linguistics. The example is introduced in this section and further developed throughout the text, where I explain the key terms of media and media linguistics (Section 1.2), raise questions of combining disciplines to investigate the interplay of language and media (1.3), contrast epistemological interests in current lines of research (1.4), discuss a set of complementary research methods and their potential to close research gaps in the field (1.5), outline the potential outcomes of present and future research for theory and practice (1.6), and conclude by calling for methodological sophistication in transdisciplinary medialinguistic research (1.7).
In order to illustrate these steps on the way from the present to the future of media linguistics, I draw on empirical data from a research project called IdĂ©e suisse and, in particular, on the Leba case study from this project. The entire project focuses on news production at the Swiss public broadcaster SRG SSR and on the contradictory expectations of SRGâs various stakeholders. As a public service institution, SRG has a federal, societal, cultural, and linguistic mandate to fulfill: fostering social integration by promoting public understanding between social groups such as urban and rural, rich and poor, lay persons and experts, immigrants and citizens. As a media enterprise, though, SRG is subject to market and competitive forces. Losing audience would mean losing public importance and legitimacy for public funding.
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Epistemologically, the researchers aimed at reconstructing promoting public understanding as the interplay of situated linguistic activity with social structures throughout levels and timescales, from the minutes and hours of writing processes in the newsroom to the years and decades of societal change. The research question and the theoretical approach led to four project modules, focusing on media policy (module A), media management (B), media production (C), and media reflection (D). Upon completion of the first phase of the project, the result of this procedure was a detailed insight into stakeholdersâ conflicting expectations and stances. Media policy expects public media to promote public understanding through their communicational offers, whereas media management considers implementing the mandate as infeasible or irrelevant in the face of market pressures. Grounded in these data, the mid-range theory of promoting public understanding was developed (Perrin 2013: 8).
A key inference from this theory is that, for the case of SRG SSR, if solutions of bringing together public and market demands cannot be revealed in the management suites of the organization, they have to be looked for in the newsrooms. This meant a focus on journalistic practices in the second phase of the project. In module D (i.e. journalistsâ metadiscourse) verbal data were analyzed, just as in modules A and B. Module C (i.e. journalistsâ media production), however, focused on observable text production activity. One hundred and twenty newswriting processes were examined and contextualized with knowledge about: explicit editorial norms of text production; writersâ individual and organizational situations; and writersâ individual and shared language awareness. One example of this linguistic newsroom ethnography is the Leba case.
The Leba case study investigates in detail the production of a news piece about demonstrations in Lebanon. These demonstrations occurred in a context of ethnic and religious diversity as well as expansion plans of neighboring countries repeatedly threatening national unity in Lebanon. Télévision Suisse Romande, the SRG SSR TV station for the French-speaking part of Switzerland, started to cover the topic in a noon issue of their news program Téléjournal. While European media often report on politically motivated violence in Lebanon, the journalist R.G. aimed at providing insights into another reality by highlighting peaceful aspects of the demonstrations in his news piece.
1.2 Definitions: zooming into newswriting
The first detail from the Leba case that matters for this chapter is the intertextual chain the journalist draws on. In his news item, R.G. integrates quotes from protesters in Lebanon, which are recorded by a video journalist (VJ) and then selected and modified by a Lebanese television station, global newswires, Swiss national television SRG SSR, and the Téléjournal (TJ) newsroom (Figure 1.1). Step by step, the utterance is recontextualized, shifted from one context to another. In this process, the semiotic means the protester used to express her stance is repeatedly reconstructed and thus nested in mediatized textual and communicative environments. These environments are influenced by agents and their stance(s) throughout the media system (Perrin 2012).
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The second detail from the Leba case that matters throughout this chapter is the fact that the journalist, in his news item, wanted to a...
