Linguistic Elements as Tools for the Analysis of Media Narratives

2021 ◽  
pp. 63-77
Author(s):  
Jolita Horbacauskiene
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Media Texts ◽  
Media Narratives ◽  
The Way

A close linguistic analysis of media discourse might provoke and provide useful information regarding the power of media itself and the way people construct meanings. The present study seeks to explore how social problems are reflected in media texts. The representation of social problems—crime, poverty, migrant crisis, as well as minority groups—contains linguistic elements which are aimed at constructing certain images of these issues. Figurative linguistic elements are used to enhance the reliability of the story, to appeal to the readers' emotions, and to manage the story and the sequence of the events which are being represented. A proper use of language in the representations social problems could be considered as an effective tool to keep readers interested in the story and transform it into one that is engaging and reliable at the same time.

scholarly journals Pragmatic functions of interrogatives in media texts

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-515
Author(s):  
Irina N. Ivanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Interactive Model ◽  
Subjective Interpretation ◽  
Media Texts ◽  
Active Commitment ◽  
The Way

A number of approaches to media texts tend to apply an interactive model to communication, and the texts are seen are intrinsically dialogic, relying on the receivers’ subjective interpretation of meaning and activation of intertextual relations. In addition, media texts are increasingly used as material for linguistic analysis with the aim to reveal how their linguistic potential is utilized by journalists to convey messages and ideas, and influence the audience. The paper discusses the pragmatic functions of interrogatives and the way they are realized in media text, more specifically in newspaper articles’ headlines, leads and bodies excerpted from British and American online media over a period of two months. The analysis is mapped against previous research of interrogatives in the field of pragmatics and medialinguistics. The main findings show that interrogatives in headlines realize a range of pragmatic roles when used on their own or as part of paratactic or hypotactic complexes. These roles are closely dependent on their syntactic and semantic features and can range from attracting and focusing readers’ attention, to urging readers to think about issues, look for certain types of answers in the text, or think of their own answers or reactions. Headlines can be expanded or clarified in the sub-headings, lead and main body of the article. In the main body, interrogatives help to structure and authenticate writer’s dialogue with the audience, making the narrative or argumentation more emphatic, and soliciting active commitment to issues, feedback and empathy from the audience. Furthermore, some topics of high public interest and importance might lead to an increase in the number of questions in media texts. Further research of larger and more varied thematically material might throw light on the way different topics affect the frequency and distribution of pragmatic roles of interrogatives in media texts.

Lost in the funhouse: Allegorical horror and cognitive mapping in Jordan Peele’s Us

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Keith Booker ◽  
Isra Daraiseh
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
American Society ◽  
Contemporary American Society ◽  
The Way

Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) is an entertaining horror film that also contains a number of interesting interpretive complications. The film is undoubtedly meant as a commentary on the inequity, inequality and injustice that saturate our supposedly egalitarian American society. Beyond that vague and general characterization, though, the film offers a number of interesting (and more specific) allegorical interpretations, none of which in themselves seem quite adequate. This article explores the plethora of signs that circulate through Us, demanding interpretation but defeating any definitive interpretation. This article explores the way Us offers clues to its meaning through engagement with the horror genre in general (especially the home invasion subgenre) and through dialogue with specific predecessors in the horror genre. At the same time, we investigate the rich array of other ways in which the film offers suggested political interpretations, none of which seem quite adequate. We then conclude, however, that such interpretive failures might well be a key message of the film, which demonstrates the difficulty of fully grasping the complex and difficult social problems of contemporary American society in a way that can be well described by Fredric Jameson’s now classic vision of the general difficulty of cognitive mapping in the late capitalist world.

scholarly journals ‘As parents congregated at parties’: Responsibility and blame in media representations of violence and school closure in an Indigenous community

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 592-606
Author(s):  
Clarissa Carden
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Indigenous Community ◽  
School Closure ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
School Teachers ◽  
Remote Indigenous Community ◽  
Primary Groups ◽  
The Way

This article considers the discourses of responsibility and blame emerging from newspaper reportage of a crisis in the remote Indigenous community of Aurukun in Northern Queensland, Australia. In doing so, it aims to contribute to the sociology of racism and add to the existing body of scholarship on the ways in which deracialised media discourse can nevertheless be racist. The month of May 2016 saw violence perpetrated by young people against the teachers and principal of the community’s only school. Teachers were evacuated to the regional city of Cairns on 10 May due to violence in the community and fears for their safety. They returned on 18 May, only to be evacuated again on 25 May. These events form the focus of the reportage analysed in this article. The way in which three primary groups of players – parents, teachers and police – are portrayed in mainstream print media is analysed in order to ascertain how responsibility and blame are apportioned in relation to these events.

scholarly journals Distinctive features of motherhood discourse in Russian media

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-231
Author(s):  
Anna A. Kuvychko
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Cognitive Structure ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Russian Media ◽  
Media Texts ◽  
Political Media ◽  
Media Discourses

This study of modern media devoted to the problems of motherhood discourse is significant and relevant due to both the axiological nature of motherhood phenomenon and socio-cultural features of the existing (present day) media space. Problems of motherhood are of enduring importance. The variety of issues concerning motherhood raised in modern media indicate the relevance and importance of all manifestations of this phenomenon for contemporary society. The purpose of the present study is to identify and reveal the features of media discourse of motherhood in socio-political media (which is a product of cognitive activity of modern Russian society) through the category of interdiscursivity. The material for this research was obtained from media texts of Internet versions of Russian socio-political media Arguments and Facts, Izvestia, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Moskovsky Komsomolets, and Kommersant, published from 2001 to 2019. The research methodology includes content analysis of online publications, classification and systematization of the research material: media texts, media text studies and description of media discourse on motherhood in the form of a cognitive structure (concept sphere). The present study is the first attempt to interpret maternal media discourse through the category of interdiscursiveness, a fusion of various discourses. The author presents media discourse on motherhood in contemporary Russian socio-political media as a combination of institutional media discourses (political, economic, legal, medical, and religious), each manifesting its own aims and using own linguistic means of presenting information. This approach to describing media discourse emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the study and indicates the relevance of its results for various fields of scientific knowledge, primarily journalism and cognitive linguistics.

scholarly journals The potentialities of corpus-based techniques for analyzing literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Khalid Shakir Hussein
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Corpus Linguistic ◽  
As I Lay Dying ◽  
Analytical Potential ◽  
The Waves ◽  
The Way

This paper presents an attempt to explore the analytical potential of five corpus-based techniques: concordances, frequency lists, keyword lists, collocate lists, and dispersion plots. The basic question addressed is related to the contribution that these techniques make to gain more objective and insightful knowledge of the way literary meanings are encoded and of the way the literary language is organized. Three sizable English novels (Joyc's Ulysses, Woolf's The Waves, and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying) are laid to corpus linguistic analysis. It is only by virtue of corpus-based techniques that huge amounts of literary data are analyzable. Otherwise, the data will keep on to be not more than several lines of poetry or short excerpts of narrative. The corpus-based techniques presented throughout this paper contribute more or less to a sort of rigorous interpretation of literary texts far from the intuitive approaches usually utilized in traditional stylistics.

Post-withdrawal Prospects for Iraq’s ‘Ultra-minorities’

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Al-Jeloo
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Successes And Failures ◽  
The Way

The signing of Iraq's Transitional Administrative Law on 8 March 2004 ushered in a new, more pluralistic era for Iraq. It was now a ‘country of many nationalities’. In addition, all Iraqi citizens were equal in their rights ‘without regard to gender, sect, opinion, belief, nationality, religion, or origin’; ‘discrimination on the basis of gender, nationality, religion, or origin’ was prohibited. However, ‘ultra-minorities’ have been the subjects of sustained oppression and active persecution. This chapter explores the successes and failures with regard to Iraq's ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities, referring especially to recent human rights reports, making for a valuable case study in the way contemporary states deal with their minority groups.

Mobile Phone Culture: The Impacts of Mobile Phone Use

2015 ◽  
pp. 658-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seung-Hyun Lee
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Phone ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Mobile Phones ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Mobile Phone Use ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

From being a simple communication technology to a key social tool, the mobile phone has become such an important aspect of people's everyday life. Mobile phones have altered the way people live, communicate, interact, and connect with others. Mobile phones are also transforming how people access and use information and media. Given the rapid pervasiveness of mobile phones in society across the world, it is important to explore how mobile phones have affected the way people communicate and interact with others, access the information, and use media, and their daily lifestyle. This article aims to explore the social and cultural implications that have come with the ubiquity, unprecedented connectivity, and advances of mobile phones. This article also focuses on the discussion about people's dependence on, attachment and addiction to mobile phones, social problems that mobile phones generate, and how people value mobile phone use.

scholarly journals The Mask of Aging: Doing Cultural Research for a ‘Social Problem’

1970 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit-Ling Luk
Keyword(s):  
Social Problem ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Social Activists ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

Debates about ‘social problems’ routinely raise questions: is the problem widespread?; how many people, and which people, does it affect?; is it getting worse?; what does it cost society?; what will it cost to deal with it? Convincing answers to such questions demand evidence, and that usually means numbers, measurements, statistics.  However,  the same group of statistics can be ‘manipulated’ by different sectors, including activists as well as policy makers. In this article the author explores was the way in which the impact of statistical dominance in social research was relayed by media coverage and also by social activists and policy makers.

scholarly journals Graphic-Stylistic Expressivity in Media Discourse

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 01151
Author(s):  
Marina Yu. Ryabova
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Educational Purpose ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Expressive Function ◽  
On Line ◽  
Communicative Context ◽  
The Guardian

The article deals with the analysis of graphic-stylistic means of the language, such as punctuation, functioning in modern English based on the language material of literary and media texts (on-line site of The Guardian). The aim of the paper is to reveal some actual functional characteristics of punctuation marks compared with their traditional syntactic and stylistic usage. The linguistic analysis is conducted within the methodology of semantic and syntactic interpretation and description. The following new functional usage of punctuation marks is described: the playing (ludic) function (creating an ironic, comic or parody effect in communication) and the expressive function emphasizing the semantics of an element in a communicative context. The importance of the undertaken analysis is to show the necessity of studying the English punctuation functions from the point of view of modern theory of communication and media linguistics as well as with an empirical educational purpose of teaching the English grammar.

The putative reader in mass media persuasion – stance, argumentation and ideology

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-423
Author(s):  
Peter R.R. White
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Texts ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

This article explores a framework for analyses of what has variously been termed the ‘implied’, ‘imagined’, ‘virtual’ or ‘putative’ reader/addressee – the effect by which ostensibly ‘monologic’ texts, such as news media commentary, political pronouncements and academic essays project particular attitudes, beliefs and expectations on to the reader/addressee. The framework is demonstrated in being applied to an examination of the construal of putative addressee positioning in a selection of mass media texts concerned with the Israeli military’s invasion of Gaza in 2014. The framework is novel in the way in which it mobilises the account of the options for dialogistic positioning offered by the appraisal-framework literature, combined with some insights from Toulmin’s notion of the argumentative ‘warrant’. Conclusions are offered as to how such analyses of the readers being ‘written into the text’ can extend insights into the rhetorical workings of such texts and their ideological functionality in naturalising particular value positions.

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