May 29
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: M. Grazia Busa
TITLE: Introducing the Language of the News
SUBTITLE: A Student’s Guide
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Simon Fraser University
SUMMARY
Living in the age of information, we are surrounded by news reports. These
stories not only keep us updated on current affairs around the globe, but also
fundamentally shape our values, beliefs, and behaviors through their
agenda-setting and framing effects. Thus, it is crucial for undergraduates who
are interested in news to learn the production of news texts and the functions
of language within this process.
Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, “Introducing the Language of the
News” aims to offer an accessible reference for the study of news from
linguistic perspectives. Using English news as its primary examples, this
textbook covers key issues within news discourse analysis and introduces how
different linguistic choices can highlight different interpretations of news
texts. In addition, the exercises after each chapter make the book an ideal
reference reading for students learning English news writing in an English as
a Foreign/Second Language (i.e., EFL/ESL) context.
Introduction: Language and Texts
The introduction overviews “linguistic competence” and “register”. The author
highlights several factors contributing to variation in language use in our
daily lives: communicative purposes, discourse participants, communication
media (e.g., spoken versus written), and social contexts (e.g., formal versus
informal). In short, this introductory chapter discusses key components of
genre/register research and sets the theoretical background for the discussion
of news discourse in the following chapters.
Chapter One: Making News
The focus of Chapter One is the media industry and driving factors of news
production. To be specific, the chapter reviews six factors of news
production: media ownership, market pressure, labor division with the
newsroom, time deadline and space-on-the-page constraints, information
technology, and convergence of media forms.
Chapter Two: Defining News
This chapter provides a definition of news and explains factors influencing
the writing of news stories. According to the author, news can be defined as
“the relaying of events that are both recent (new) and relevant (interesting)”
(p. 25). Following such a definition, the author reviews the primary factors
that make a story potentially newsworthy: timeliness, location, topic and
familiarity, pictures and multimedia, dramatic potential, and public
interests. In addition to newsworthiness, objectivity is another crucial
standard for news texts and it determines the neutral language style of news
texts. The author concludes this chapter by explaining different types of
newspapers (e.g., broadsheets versus tabloids) and stories (e.g., hard news
versus soft news).
Chapter Three: Sourcing News
Chapter Four: Conveying Meaning through Design
These two short chapters (each is 10 pages long) briefly review the
information gathering stage of news production and the visual layout of a
newspaper page. Chapter Three starts by making a distinction between on-diary
sources (i.e., regular contacts of journalists) and off-diary sources (i.e.,
contacts reached by journalists when unanticipated events happen). The chapter
then reviews general issues regarding interviews and how information gathered
by journalists is used in news stories: attributions, anonymous sources, and
quotations. Following the above discussion, Chapter Four focuses on print news
and analyzes how page design (e.g., the position of headlines, pictures, body
copies, etc.) represents a powerful form of non-verbal communication.
Chapter Five: Structuring the Story
Chapter Six: Head, Lead and Proper Story
These two Chapters examine news story structures and the linguistic features
of news headlines, leads and the body copies. To be specific, Chapter Five
deals with three basic features of news stories: story structure, impersonal
language, and coherent texts. The chapter starts with an overview of three
common structures of news stories: the inverted pyramid, narrative
storytelling, and the hourglass (i.e., a combination of the previous two).
Then, the chapter goes into an exploration of impersonal writing and how
certain linguistic rules (e.g., the avoidance of first- or second-person
pronouns and emotive words or expressions) maintain the objectivity of news.
The chapter concludes with a brief explanation of coordination and
subordination and their function in language coherence.
By comparison, the focus of Chapter Six is on the components of news stories
(e.g., headlines, leads and body copies) and their grammatical features and
embedded rhetorical strategies. The author first discusses the synthetic
language of news headlines and how such linguistic characteristics lead to a
nominalization tendency in news headlines. Then, the discussion of news
headlines shifts to their rhetorical features (e.g., intertextuality, word
association, and metaphor), followed by an overview of informative headlines.
Finally, the chapter explains two types of news leads (i.e., direct leads and
delayed leads) and offers an example of how information is structured in the
body section.
Chapter Seven: The Tools of the Trade
Chapter Eight: Reporting Information and Evaluation of Likelihood
Chapter Nine: The Power of Words
The final three chapters are the most linguistic-centric ones, as they offer
an overview of linguistic strategies used in news discourse. Chapter Seven
examines the linguistic strategies used by journalists to compact lots of
information in short texts, such as nominalization, brevity (e.g., using
“although” instead of “despite the fact that”), and the passive voice. The
chapter then reviews some general syntactic issues in news writing: verbal
structure, voice, and thematization.
Chapter Eight discusses how journalists use various linguistic choices to
convert news sources into news stories. The Chapter explores two aspects of
information reporting: the use of reported speech (e.g., direct quote,
indirect quote, paraphrase, etc.), and the use of modality (e.g., epistemic
modality versus deontic modality).
Finally, Chapter Nine explains the “power of words” and how newswriters can
exploit the expressive potential of language to convey particular stances on
news topics. The primary focus of the chapter is the English language, and the
author demonstrates how careful word choices influence readers’
interpretations of the same news event, reinforce society’s perception of
certain groups, and promote particular ideologies.
EVALUATION
Overall, this book presents a concise but well-organized introduction of news
production and discourse. Covering a wide range of topics in only 164 pages,
the book can serve as a good complementary reading for ESL/EFL learners
interested in English news. As mentioned earlier, the student exercises at the
end of each chapter make the book ready-to-use for ESL/EFL instructors. In
addition, the book’s language style is straightforward and succinct, which is
another advantage for its usage in ESL/EFL settings.
Meanwhile, there are two minor limitations within the book, which might be
addressed in its further editions. First, the book may consider re-organizing
certain chapters to make its presentational logic more coherent. Chapter Three
(Sourcing News) can be combined with Chapter Eight (Reporting Information and
Evaluation of Likelihood), as many linguistic details of the former are not
properly explained until the latter. Similarly, Chapter Five (Structuring the
Story) and Chapter Six (Head, Lead and Proper Story) can be combined, since
both chapters deal with the structuring of news texts. Second, although the
book’s simplicity is a desired design for its primary readers (ESL/EFL
learners), it would still be beneficial if more theories regarding news
discourse were introduced in the book. In the current version, the critical
analysis of news discourse is only introduced in the very last chapter and
several key texts within the field (e.g., Fairclough, 1989; van Dijk, 1988)
are not discussed. In the discussion of the media industry (Chapters One &
Two), some additional reviews of the political economy of communication would
also be beneficial (e.g. Mosco, 2009; Wasko, Murdock & Sousa, 2011).
Overall, the book is a good reference for intro-level courses on language and
communication, especially for ESL/EFL learners who want a concise overview of
English news discourse.
REFERENCES
Busa, M. G. (2013). “Introducing the language of the news”. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Fairclough, N. (1989). “Language and power”. London: Longman.
Mosco, V. (2009). “The political economy of communication” (2nd ed.). London:
Sage.
Wasko, J., Murdock, G., & Sousa, H. (2011). “The handbook of political economy
of communications”. London: Sage.
Van Dijk, T. (1988). “News as discourse”. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum
Associates.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sibo Chen is a PHD student in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser
University. He received his MA in Applied Linguistics from the Department of
Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada. His major research interests are
language and communication, discourse analysis, and genre theories.
May 26
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Piotr Cap
EDITOR: Urszula Okulska
TITLE: Analyzing Genres in Political Communication
SUBTITLE: Theory and practice
SERIES TITLE: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 50
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Simon Fraser University
SUMMARY
Although investigations of political language have been a pivotal topic in
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the broad body of previous studies has done
relatively little to provide a comprehensive and organized set of answers to
the theoretical complexities of political genre research. Given that
situation, “Analyzing Genres in Political Communication” has a two-fold
objective: “(1) to make a contribution to the study of genres in political
communication; and (2) to offer insights that add to the analysis of
communicative genres in general (p. 11)”. With contributions from a range of
experts with diverse backgrounds, this edited collection presents the latest
developments in political genre analysis and can be informative for
researchers in a wide range of disciplines, such as Applied Linguistics,
Communication, Political Science, and other fields.
The introduction, “Analyzing Genres in Political Communication”, addresses
general problems in genre analysis and overviews the studies in the following
chapters. Generally speaking, genre could be interpreted as: (1) abstractions
of communicative acts, (2) indicators of situational contexts, (3) flexible
macrostructures with both obligatory and optional elements, (4) interrelated
units in a social field, and (5) assigners of social roles for their
participants (pp. 3-7). In the field of political genre analysis, research
thus far has been mainly conducted at the national level, focusing on
discourse with significant mediation functions, such as political speeches,
press conferences, debates, and so on. Overall, research in political genres
poses three key questions for the theory of communicative genres (pp. 8-9):
A. The heterogeneity of political genres questions the analytical consistency
proposed by genre theories: Can the current methodological procedures
adequately address the typologies and hierarchies observed in political
genres?
B. The analysis of political genres requires the revisit of many common
properties of communicative genres: Do these properties also apply to
political genres, especially those on situational contexts and social
relations?
C. The interactions between policies and political genres bring the issue of
genre accomplishment: Is there a hypothetical “hyper-genre” in general for
various forms of political communication?
To address these questions, the collection explores various genres within
political communication in 12 chapters, divided into two parts based on their
research focus: “theory-driven approaches” (Part I: Chapters 1-6) and
“data-driven approaches” (Part II: Chapters 7-12).
Chapter One, “Genres in Political Discourse”, follows up on the theoretical
account in the introduction and reviews genre theories in various traditions:
the “New Rhetoric” approach (Bazerman, 1988), the “Systemic Functional
Grammar” approach (Martin, 1992), the “Functional Move” approach (Swales,
1990), and the “Socio-critical” approach (Bhatia, 2004). Then, the chapter
provides an analysis of Austrian chancellors’ inaugural speeches and concludes
that analyses of politically sensitive genres need to not only focus on
generic features of political texts, but also to account for the texts’
relevant registers and discourses.
Chapter Two, “Political Interviews in Context”, presents an analysis of
political interviews based on an integration of various discourse methods,
such as conversation analysis, pragmatics, social psychology, and content
analysis. The authors conceptualize political interviews as a “hybrid genre”
in essence and discuss how this hybrid genre frequently departures from its
default organization.
Chapter Three, “Policy, Policy Communication and Discursive Shifts”, deals
with the European Union’s (EU) policy discourses on climate change via a
critical discourse analysis of its policy documents. The analysis was
conducted from two perspectives: policy-making and policy-communication. The
conclusion reached is that the EU discourse on climate change can be
characterized by a large degree of discursive change that frames climate
change from an EU perspective (i.e. climate change as a crisis will threaten
EU’s future economy and presents a global crisis).
Chapter Four, “The Television Election Night Broadcast”, describes the genres
and sub-genres of television election night broadcasts and demonstrates that
they, as a macro-genre, involve complex interlocking of different genres
(speeches, interviews, breaking news, etc.), which shows how complex generic
structures are influenced by both internal and external factors. The
structures of election night broadcasts depend on the external social and
political contexts in which they are situated as well as their internal
communication logic and information economy.
Chapter Five “Analyzing Meetings in Political and Business Contexts” focuses
on meetings in political and business contexts and explores common strategies
shared in both situations. The chapter highlights the scarcity of theories of
meetings across different settings and discusses specific discursive
strategies in spontaneous interactions during meetings. Based on comparative
analyses of political and business meetings, the chapter further investigates
the impact of organization knowledge on the meeting genre as well as the role
of communications for genre identification.
Chapter Six, “Presenting Politics”, the last chapter of Part I, serves as a
transition between the collection’s two parts and offers a reflection on
persuasion and performance across political genres. The chapter reviews two
approaches to addressing persuasion in political communication (persuasion as
a psychological process versus persuasion as a cultural performance). The
chapter tackles Question C (see above): given the heterogeneity of political
genres and their theoretical frameworks, can the complexity of political
genres be addressed within the existing genre theories, or should the research
go beyond them?
Chapters in Part II pay more attention to the investigation of specific genres
through data-driven methods. Chapter Seven, “Legitimizing the Iraq War”,
discusses the theory of legitimation through the rhetoric of judge-penitence.
The chapter further analyzes the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s
self-critiques of Danish collaboration with German Nazis during World War II,
which established moral credibility and moral ground for the legitimation of
the Danish government’s engagement in the Iraqi war.
Chapter Eight, “Macro and Micro, Quantitative and Qualitative”, explores
election night speeches in Britain and German and addresses the most typical
characteristic in political speeches: the construction of the binary
opposition of “us versus them”. Based on quantitative and qualitative
analyses, the chapter shows that for election night speeches, the
cross-cultural similarities at the micro level may not correspond to
similarities at the macro level.
Chapter Nine, “Reframing the American Dream”, examines the genre of political
debates. Focusing on the final televised presidential debate in the 2008 US
election, the chapter argues that the ‘nation as family’ metaphor proposed by
Lakoff (2002) has significant implications for US political discourse. The two
competing moral models (paternal vs. maternal) within US politics were
consolidated through the strategic use of personal references and pronouns by
John McCain and Barack Obama during the debate.
Chapter Ten, “The Late-night TV Talk Show as a Strategic Genre”, and Chapter
Eleven, “Multimodal Legitimation”, continue to investigate the 2008 US
presidential election, exploring late night shows and online election
advertisements. To be specific, Chapter Ten works with a selection of popular
talk shows in US and shows that their generic conventions tend to be recruited
to suit politician’s aims. By comparison, Chapter Eleven approaches the
multimodal legitimation offered by Obama’s 2008 campaign and discusses the
general question of hybridity within political genres: if a well-established
genre (e.g. political speeches) was adapted into a non-conventional
communication form (e.g. online advertisements), would it continue to dominate
the legitimation process of political communications, or would it be reduced
to a supportive role? The analysis in Chapter Eleven highlights the
significance of semiotic simultaneity in multimodal legitimation.
Finally, Chapter Twelve, “Blogging as the Mediatization of Politics”, deals
with the issue of mediation offered by political blogs, reflecting the
digitization and interdiscursivity of online discourse. Based on quantitative
corpus analysis, the study scrutinizes the functional and structural features
of political blogs. Overall, the chapter shows how political communication
function as a complex network with increasingly mediated and interactive
practices of civil society.
EVALUATION
In summary, this book presents an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of
political communication from the genre perspective. Covering a wide range of
genres, tit demonstrates not only the complexity of political genres
themselves, but also the contributions of political communication for genre
theories. Specifically, Chapters Five and Six provide theoretical updates on
current political genre research, showing how studies on political genres can
further benefit not only genre theory, but also other disciplines such as
political science and communication. Meanwhile, Part II continues the
theoretical discussion of legitimation, which can benefit the growing body of
scholarship in this area. Finally, this volume also offers much needed
insights on political TV talk shows and political blogs, which have previously
received little linguistic attention but are becoming significant
communicative phenomena in public discourse.
Unfortunately, the book does have one minor limitation, which might be
addressed in a future edition: it focuses exclusively on the Western context.
All chapters are based on political communications in Europe and United
States, which limits some of the findings to non-western contexts such as Asia
and Latin America. As pointed out in Chapter Eight, further studies based on
non-western cultures may “contribute even more to the way political genres can
be defined without running the risk of a Western bias” (p. 287) and in this
regard, more studies based on non-Western contexts in a future edition would
further improve the book’s theoretical depth and breadth.
Overall, though, this book offers significant theoretical and methodological
updates for genre theories. The book is sure to appeal to genre scholars as
well as those in related disciplines. It is an interesting and useful
collection with a wealth of up-to-date information for anyone interested in
political genres.
REFERENCES
Bazerman, C. (1988). “Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the
experimental article in science”. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bhatia, V. (2004). “Worlds of written discourse”. London: Continuum.
Lakoff, G. (2002). “Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think”.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, J. (1992). English text. Systems and structure.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Swales, J. (1990). “Genre analysis: English in academic and research
settings”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sibo Chen is a graduate student in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser
University. He received his MA in Applied Linguistics from the Department of
Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada. His major research interests are
language and communication, discourse analysis, and genre theories.
May 09
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Multimodal Epistemologies
Subtitle: Towards an Integrated Framework
Series Title: Routledge Studies in Multimodality
Publication Year: 2014
Publisher: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
http://www.routledge.com/
Book URL: http://www.routledge.com/u/MaioraniChristieLL
Editor: Arianna Maiorani
Editor: Christine Christie
Hardback: ISBN: 9780415825238 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 130.00
Abstract:
This volume develops a new multimodal semiotic approach to the study of communication, examining how multimodal discourse is construed transmedially and interculturally and how new technologies and cultural stances inform communicative contexts across the world. It contributes to current theoretical debates in the disciplines of semiotics, linguistics, multimodality, and pragmatics, as well as those aspects of pedagogy and film studies that engage with the notions of text and narrative by addressing questions such as: How do we study multimedia communication? How do we incorporate the impact of new media technologies into the study of Linguistics and Semiotics? How do we construe culture in modern communication? How useful are the current multidisciplinary approaches to multimodal communication?
Through the analysis of specific case studies that are developed within diverse academic disciplines and which draw on a range of theoretical frameworks, the goal of this book is to provide a basis for an overarching framework that can be applied by scholars and students with different academic and cultural backgrounds.
May 09
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context
Series Title: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 241
Publication Year: 2014
Publisher: John Benjamins
http://www.benjamins.com/
Book URL: https://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns.241
Editor: Fabienne H. Baider
Editor: Georgeta Cislaru
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027270740 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 143.00
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027270740 Pages: Price: Europe EURO 95.00
Electronic: ISBN: 9789027270740 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 80.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027256461 Pages: Price: Europe EURO 100.70
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027256461 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 80.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027256461 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 143.00
Abstract:
This book presents new issues in the study of the interface of emotions and
language, and their use in social context. Two fundamental questions are
tackled: the way different languages encode emotional information and the core
role emotions play in languages’ structure, use and learning. Seldom treated
means of expressing emotions (such as interjections, conditionals, scalarity,
allocentric constructions), the social and professional impact of emotions and
the latest developments in the interface of speech recognition / emotions are
some of the key contributions to this volume. The cross-cultural perspective
contrasts new couples of languages (among which Australian aboriginal
languages, Cypriot Greek, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian) and addresses
sociolinguistic, pragmatic and discursive issues. Most of the papers attempt
interesting theoretical articulations that aim at a better understanding of
the linguistic and sociolinguistic nature of emotions. This book will be
highly relevant for students and researchers interested in emotions,
semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as prosody and philosophy
of language.
May 06
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Language, Culture, and Mind
Subtitle: Natural Constructions and Social Kinds
Publication Year: 2014
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book URL: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/cognitive-linguistics/language-culture-and-mind-natural-constructions-and-social-kinds?format=PB
Author: Paul Kockelman
Paperback: ISBN: 9781107689022 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 23.99
Paperback: ISBN: 9781107689022 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 37.99
Abstract:
Editor’s Note: This is a new paperback edition of a previously announced book.
Based on fieldwork carried out in a Mayan village in Guatemala, this book examines local understandings of mind through the lens of language and culture. It focuses on a variety of grammatical structures and discursive practices through which mental states are encoded and social relations are expressed: inalienable possessions, such as body parts and kinship terms; interjections, such as ‘ouch’ and ‘yuck’; complement-taking predicates, such as ‘believe’ and ‘desire’; and grammatical categories such as mood, status and evidentiality. And, more generally, it develops a theoretical framework through which both community-specific and human-general features of mind may be contrasted and compared. It will be of interest to researchers and students working within the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy.
1. Language, culture, mind: emblems of the status human;
2. Inalienable possessions: what hearts, mothers, and shadows have in common;
3. Interclausal relations: how to enclose a mind by disclosing a sign;
4. Myths about time and theories of mind: why the moon married the sun;
5. Other minds and possible worlds: when psychological depth is dialogical breadth;
6. Interjections: why the center of emotion is at the edge of language;
7. Conclusion: natural constructions and social kinds.
May 06
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Meaning, Discourse and Society
Publication Year: 2014
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book URL: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/discourse-analysis/meaning-discourse-and-society?format=PB
Author: Wolfgang Teubert
Paperback: ISBN: 9781107660502 Pages: Price: U.K. £ 24.99
Paperback: ISBN: 9781107660502 Pages: Price: U.S. $ 38.99
Abstract:
Editor’s Note: This is a new paperback edition of a previously announced book.
Meaning, Discourse and Society investigates the construction of reality within discourse. When people talk about things such as language, the mind, globalisation or weeds, they are less discussing the outside world than objects they have created collaboratively by talking about them. Wolfgang Teubert shows that meaning cannot be found in mental concepts or neural activity, as implied by the cognitive sciences. He argues instead that meaning is negotiated and knowledge is created by symbolic interaction, thus taking language as a social, rather than a mental, phenomenon. Discourses, Teubert contends, can be viewed as collective minds, enabling the members of discourse communities to make sense of themselves and of the world around them. By taking an active stance in constructing the reality they share, people thus can take part in moulding the world in accordance with their perceived needs.
Introduction; Part I. Meaning, the Mind and the Brain:
1. The cognitive turn;
2. The long history of mind linguistics;
3. What do we know about mental concepts?;
4. Morphing theoretical sémes into ‘real’ concepts;
5. From mental representations to conceptual ontologies;
6. What is meaning?;
7. Where should we look for meaning?;
Part II. Discourse and Society:
8. Language as discourse;
9. Society presupposes language, and language presupposes society;
10. A closer look at oral societies;
11. Differences between oral and literate societies;
12. Empirical linguistics deals only with recorded language;
13. Meaning, knowledge and the construction of reality;
14. The language of the scientific experimental report;
15. Diachronicity, intertextuality and hermeneutics;
16. Meaning and the interpretation of a haiku;
Conclusion.
RSS
Recent Comments