Media linguistics

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Media linguistics is the linguistic study of language use in the media. The fundamental aspect of media linguistics as a new systematic approach to the study of media language is that media text is one of the most common forms of language existence today.[ citation needed ] It studies the functioning of language in the media sphere, or modern mass communication presented by print, audiovisual, digital, and networked media. Media linguistics investigates the relationship between language use, which is regarded as an interface between social and cognitive communication practice, and public discourse conveyed through media. [1]

Contents

Media linguistics is being formed in the process of the differentiation of linguistics as a general theory of language, and is a sub-field of linguistics similar to other fields such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, developmental linguistics, legal linguistics, political linguistics, etc.

Definition

The 1968 Ray-Ban advertisement uses a play on the English word "sport," referring both to a person and the activity. 1968 Ray Ban Advertisement.jpg
The 1968 Ray-Ban advertisement uses a play on the English word "sport," referring both to a person and the activity.

Modern media linguistics examines not only the written language of media, but also media speech. Media linguistics includes media speech studies that examine (1) the speech behavior of mass communication participants and (2) specific areas, textures, and genres of media texts. Media linguistics analyses texts, as well as their production and reception. [2] [3]

Thus, in principle, media linguistics seeks to explain the particular case of the functioning of language—in mass communication with its complex structure and changing properties—amid the overall trends of language and speech culture. [4] It studies language in relation to medium-specific aspects, such as the specific properties of media texts or platforms, and sometimes includes analysis of multimodality. [2] Other purposes include analyzing patterns of language use within certain historical contexts, and establishing differences between "normal" language and media language. [5] [6] Media linguistics is closely related to contemporary media practices and intends to impact them, in particular, by means of media education. Studying language use in the media can be used to help develop critical media literacy, for example in relation to stereotypes. [3]

Media linguistics includes the study of traditional mass media texts (typically print or broadcast news) as well as social media and other digital media such as blog posts or SMS messages. [2] [7] Advertisements, amongst other multimodal media, are commonly analyzed in the context of media linguistics. [8] The study of fictional film and television has recently emerged as an important area of media linguistics. [9]

In recent years, media linguistics has been influenced by "transnational and translocal" communication and the relationship between a country's culture and its use of language. [10]

Importance

Media linguistics includes the use of the media as a source of both historical and contemporary data for research. [11] It is critical in examining regional language and regional dialect models of media involving the portrayal of society and culture. [12] [13] Media linguistics is crucial for understanding how the media broadcasts language ideologies and is able to strengthen representation of a less common, minority language or maintain representation of a dominant language. [5] [14]

Media language is used in second language courses given its ties to culture and its surrounding context as well as its role in exposing students to native-speaker syntax and vocabulary. [11] [12]

Impact

The study of media linguistics can address questions surrounding power, resistance, societies and identities. [11] A study conducted by Peng in 2020 utilised online surveys and principal component analysis to analyse the results, subsequently finding "an intertwined relationship in which the effects of media exposure on acceptability judgments are moderated by language attitudes." [15]

Applications

The advent of digital communication technologies from the mid-1990s onwards blurred the boundaries between individual and mass communication. [2]

Since the early 21st century, linguists have been studying how "computer-mediated communication (CMC)" differs from older forms of media communication. While the level of interactivity between readers and writers remains the same, CMC shows increasing evidence of the media attempting to gain more and more of their reader's attention. [16]

The variables that have some of the strongest effect on how language changes over time are the number of speakers of a language and how connected they are to the other speakers. This is especially evident within social media, which has the ability to connect many speakers of the same language. [17] [18] CMC also shows how people might form exclusive "groups" online, and form a sense of relatedness with these groups or other online users. [7]

A technical medium (or device) can have different communication forms, so it is not enough to just study the medium. This is even more apparent with the emergence of new media. [2]

Language and media ideologies intertwine in complex ways. People's ideas about different communicative media and different media functions shape the ways they use these media, similar to how language ideologies impact the way people speak. [19] Some scholars found that the perception of message in new media environments was highly influenced by ideologies surrounding the generic type. For example, text messages from prominent political figures were reconstructed in TV newscasts to be more standard, adult, and official than the original transcripts. [19]

Participation frameworks

The phrase 'participation framework' originated from Erving Goffman in 1981. [20] With the advent of new media, the interactions that take place in media discourse has changed, and therefore the way we approach media participation framework also has to change.

Traditionally, in written discourse, the participation framework is made up of the author(s), who disseminate their message through the written medium to the reader(s), and their work can be read at any time after publication. [20]

However, at the current stage of media discourse, there are greater levels of intertextuality, with a blurring of lines between spoken and written media. [20] Readers are no longer reading works in protracted isolation, and can send the articles to others or post their own comments, oftentimes also eliciting a response from the journalist. [20]

Theories

Hyperreality

Binary opposition

Multimodality

In different countries

Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between society and language. It is concerned with the reason for speaking differently in different social contexts and the social functions of languages. It also looks into the ways a language is used to convey social meaning. [27] For example, a concept called language choice or diglossia involves two varieties present in a language called "high" and "low" and they are used in different conditions.

Sociolinguistics has 3 main areas of focus. They look at the language use in multilingual speech communities, language variation involving its users and its uses. Language use in multilingual speech communities includes language maintenance and shift. Language variation involving its users includes language changes while language variation involving its uses includes politeness theory. [27]

Internet Linguistics

Internet linguistics is a field advocated by linguist David Crystal. It is defined as the synchronic analysis of language in all areas of Internet activity, including email, the various kinds of chatroom and games interaction, instant messaging, and Web pages, and including associated areas of computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as SMS messaging (texting). [28]

As David Crystal posits, "Netspeak is more than an aggregate of spoken and written features... it does things that neither of these other mediums do, and must accordingly be seen as a new species of communication". [29] According to Marilyn Deegan, they display fluidity, simultaneity (being available on an indefinite number of machines), and non- degradability in copying. They also transcend the traditional limitations on textual dissemination; and they have permeable boundaries (because of the way one text may be integrated within others or display links to others). [29]

Several of these properties have consequences for language, and these combined with those associated with speech and writing to make Netspeak a genuine 'third medium'. [29]

Political Linguistics

Political linguistics is an interdisciplinary subject of study that encompasses language, media and politics. Media platforms have played increasingly larger and dominant roles in modern politics with the rapid advancement of technology allowing for greater political discourse. [30]

Language has the ability to shape political reality by influencing thought, guiding public discourse., [31] and subconsciously alters the way people speak and think. The political power of language is apparent in propaganda and linguistic stereotyping, as well as through verbal nuances employed by politicians. [32] However, it is important to realise that one may not always be aware of the extent to which their knowledge and identity have been shaped through language. Mass persuasion also has to be linguistically unobtrusive, because the more subtle the language manipulation appears, the more insidious its effect on an unsuspecting public. [31]

See also

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.

William Labov is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics.

Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics and anthropology which deals with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, and its role in making and maintaining cultural practices and societal structures. While many linguists believe that a true field of anthropological linguistics is nonexistent, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, many others regard the two as interchangeable.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice. CDA combines critique of discourse and explanation of how it figures within and contributes to the existing social reality, as a basis for action to change that existing reality in particular respects. Scholars working in the tradition of CDA generally argue that (non-linguistic) social practice and linguistic practice constitute one another and focus on investigating how societal power relations are established and reinforced through language use. In this sense, it differs from discourse analysis in that it highlights issues of power asymmetries, manipulation, exploitation, and structural inequities in domains such as education, media, and politics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Discourse analysis</span> Generic term for the analysis of social, language policy or historiographical discourse phenomena

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant semiotic event.

Norman Fairclough is an emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. He is one of the founders of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as applied to sociolinguistics. CDA is concerned with how power is exercised through language. CDA studies discourse; in CDA this includes texts, talk, video and practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Speech community</span> Group of people who share expectations regarding linguistic usage

A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.

In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal, choosing words that are considered more "formal", and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as ain't and y'all.

Integrationism is an approach in the theory of communication that emphasizes innovative participation by communicators within contexts and rejects rule-based models of language. It was developed by a group of linguists at the University of Oxford during the 1980s, notably Roy Harris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet linguistics</span> Domain of linguistics

Internet linguistics is a domain of linguistics advocated by the English linguist David Crystal. It studies new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the Internet and of other new media, such as Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging. Since the beginning of human–computer interaction (HCI) leading to computer-mediated communication (CMC) and Internet-mediated communication (IMC), experts, such as Gretchen McCulloch have acknowledged that linguistics has a contributing role in it, in terms of web interface and usability. Studying the emerging language on the Internet can help improve conceptual organization, translation and web usability. Such study aims to benefit both linguists and web users combined.

Social semiotics is a branch of the field of semiotics which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain meaning-making as a social practice. Semiotics, as originally defined by Ferdinand de Saussure, is "the science of the life of signs in society". Social semiotics expands on Saussure's founding insights by exploring the implications of the fact that the "codes" of language and communication are formed by social processes. The crucial implication here is that meanings and semiotic systems are shaped by relations of power, and that as power shifts in society, our languages and other systems of socially accepted meanings can and do change.

Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics, and feminist language reform and media studies.

Multiliteracy is an approach to literacy theory and pedagogy coined in the mid-1990s by the New London Group. The approach is characterized by two key aspects of literacy - linguistic diversity and multimodal forms of linguistic expressions and representation. It was coined in response to two major changes in the globalized environment. One such change was the growing linguistic and cultural diversity due to increased transnational migration. The second major change was the proliferation of new mediums of communication due to advancement in communication technologies e.g the internet, multimedia, and digital media. As a scholarly approach, multiliteracy focuses on the new "literacy" that is developing in response to the changes in the way people communicate globally due to technological shifts and the interplay between different cultures and languages.

Linguistics is the study of language. The modern-day scientific study of linguistics is called a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.

Mediated stylistics or media stylistics is a new and still emerging approach to the analysis of media texts. It aims to take seriously two ideas: first, that media texts involve 'the construction of stories by other means'; and second, that in an age marked by digital connectivity, media texts are inherently interactive phenomena. To meet this twofold aim, mediated stylistics has brought together the analytic toolkits of discursive psychology—which is finely attuned to the contextual specificities of interaction—and stylistics—which is finely attuned to the grammatical/rhetorical/narratorial specificities of texts as texts. Recent research in which mediated stylistics has been put to work, for instance, has shown how mediated representation of issues like sexism, sexualisation, alleged rape and violence against women can differ, and differ in rhetorically consequential ways, from the original un-mediated source material.

Deborah Sue Schiffrin was an American linguist who researched areas of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, producing seminal work on the topic of English discourse markers.

Paul Baker is a British professor and linguist at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, corpus-assisted discourse studies and language and identity. He is known for his research on the language of Polari. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts.

Michele Zappavigna is an Australian linguist. She is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her major contributions are based on the discourse of social media and ambient affiliation. Her work is interdisciplinary and covers studies in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), corpus linguistics, multimodality, social media, online discourse and social semiotics. Zappavigna is the author of six books and numerous journal articles covering these disciplines.

References

  1. ↑ "Media Linguistics". Zurich University of Applied Sciences. December 7, 2020. Retrieved March 27, 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Luginbühl, Martin (2015). "Media Linguistics: On Mediality and Culturality". 1plus10. Living Linguistics. 1: 9–26. doi:10.5167/uzh-118869.
  3. 1 2 3 Bednarek, Monika (2018). Language and Television Series. doi:10.1017/9781108559553. ISBN   978-1-108-55955-3. S2CID   158568170.[ page needed ]
  4. ↑ Hult, Francis M. (24 June 2010). "Swedish television as a mechanism for language planning and policy". Language Problems and Language Planning. 34 (2): 158–181. doi:10.1075/lplp.34.2.04hul.
  5. 1 2 Johnson, Sally; Ensslin, Astrid, eds. (2007). Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies. A&C Black. p. 33. ISBN   978-0-8264-9548-8.
  6. ↑ Jucker, Andreas H. (1992). Social Stylistics. doi:10.1515/9783110851151. ISBN   978-3-11-012969-4. S2CID   152845404.[ page needed ]
  7. 1 2 Cutler, Cecelia; Røyneland, Unn (2018). "Multilingualism in the Digital Sphere". Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication. pp. 3–26. doi:10.1017/9781316135570.002. hdl: 10852/69757 . ISBN   978-1-316-13557-0.
  8. ↑ Tanaka, Keiko (1999). Advertising Language: A Pragmatic Approach to Advertisements in Britain and Japan. Psychology Press. pp. 1–4. ISBN   978-0-415-19835-6.
  9. ↑ Bednarek, Monika; Zago, Raffaele (2022). Bibliography of linguistic research on fictional (narrative, scripted) television series and films/movies.[ self-published source? ]
  10. ↑ Hauser, Stefan; Luginbühl, Martin, eds. (2012). Contrastive Media Analysis: Approaches to linguistic and cultural aspects of mass media communication. John Benjamins Publishing. ISBN   978-90-272-7329-1. OCLC   818870228.[ page needed ]
  11. 1 2 3 Bell, Allan (March 1995). "Language and the Media". Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 15: 23–41. doi:10.1017/S0267190500002592. S2CID   145762654.
  12. 1 2 Oroujlou, Nasser (2012). "The Importance of Media in Foreign Language Learning". Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences. 51: 24–28. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.08.113 .
  13. ↑ Stepaniuk, Krzysztof; Jarosz, Katarzyna (1 July 2021). "Persuasive linguistic tricks in social media marketing communication—The memetic approach". PLOS ONE. 16 (7): e0253983. Bibcode:2021PLoSO..1653983S. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0253983 . PMC   8248608 . PMID   34197549.
  14. ↑ Lee, Christopher; Kahle, Lynn (December 2016). "The linguistics of social media: communication of emotions and values in sport". Sport Marketing Quarterly. 25 (4): 201–212. Gale   A491086073 ProQuest   1875832671.
  15. ↑ Peng, Chun-Yi (28 April 2020). "The effects of media exposure and language attitudes on grammaticality judgments". Global Chinese. 6 (1): 69–95. doi:10.1515/glochi-2020-0003. S2CID   215770453.
  16. ↑ Rowe, Charley; Wyss, Eva Lia, eds. (2009). Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions. Hampton Press. pp. 13–32. ISBN   978-1-57273-929-1. OCLC   320622239.
  17. ↑ Nettle, Daniel (June 1999). "Is the rate of linguistic change constant?". Lingua. 108 (2–3): 119–136. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.500.4848 . doi:10.1016/s0024-3841(98)00047-3.
  18. ↑ "Social Media Speeds Up Language Evolution". Language Magazine. Retrieved 2020-10-09.
  19. 1 2 Akkaya, Aslihan (July 2014). "Language, Discourse, and New Media: A Linguistic Anthropological Perspective: Language and New Media". Language and Linguistics Compass. 8 (7): 285–300. doi:10.1111/lnc3.12082.
  20. 1 2 3 4 Lemke, Jay L. (2012). "Multimedia and discourse analysis". In Handford, Michael; Gee, James Paul (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis. pp. 441–454. ISBN   978-0-203-80906-8.
  21. ↑ Nasrullah Mambrol (April 3, 2016). "Hyperreality" . Retrieved March 29, 2021.
  22. 1 2 "Binary Opposition" . Retrieved March 28, 2021.
  23. 1 2 "Multimodality". UCL Institute of education. February 16, 2012. Retrieved March 26, 2021.
  24. ↑ Teun A. Van Dijk (1988). News as Discourse. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. ISBN   0-8058-0828-0 . Retrieved 18 February 2013.
  25. ↑ de:Medienlinguistik
  26. ↑ "Media Linguistics": a scientific web site: http://medialing.spbu.ru/world_of_medialinguistics/ and an international journal of the same name https://medialing.ru
  27. 1 2 An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. 2013. p. 512. ISBN   978-1-40827-674-7.
  28. ↑ Crystal, David (February 2005). "The scope of Internet linguistics" (PDF).[ self-published source? ]
  29. 1 2 3 Crystal, David (2006). Language and the Internet. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-86859-4.[ page needed ]
  30. ↑ Pan, Janice (May 2018). "Language, Media and Politics: The Pragmatics of Political Discourse". Bandung: Journal of the Global South 2018. 5.
  31. 1 2 Luu, Chi (10 February 2016). "The Linguistics of Mass Persuasion: How Politicians Make "Fetch" Happen (Part I)". JSTOR Daily.
  32. ↑ "Knowledge and Language". TOK 2022. Retrieved April 2, 2021.
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