New media language (edited by J. Aitchison, D. M. Lewis), Sintesi del corso di Lingua Inglese

Scarica New media language (edited by J. Aitchison, D. M. Lewis) e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! New Media Language From newspapers and television to email, the internet and text messaging, there are ever increasing media conduits for the news. This book investigates how developments in world media have affected, and been affected by, language. Foreword Simon Jenkins The media never rest. Their various modes are in perpetual circulation. Yes those who rely on the media should be aware of their changing character. Introduction Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis In recent decades, the media have seen an unprecedented amount of change, in quantity, technology, and wider public participation. New media modes have come to the forefront: newspapers and radio have been joined by television and the internet. The speed of transmission has increased, and many more readers/viewers participate both passively, and actively. Media language affects our view of the world and the language. Globalization versus fragmentation may be the most noticeable two-way tug. News reports leap across the globe in seconds, and this has resulted in some similarities in media styles across widely separated geographical regions. In other cases, the reverse has happened, the immensity of the world has led to a tightening of small-scale networks, resulting in some fragmentation, as people try to maintain local ties and their own identity. For example, global traumas have long been personalized by journalists (a major air crash, for example, is routinely reported as an event worthy of world-wide notice, while at the same time reporters try to make the tragedy vivid by highlighting the fate of innocent individuals). But the contrast between the global and the personal has become more pronounced in recent years, and so has a related tug between conformity and individualization. Linguistic expansion versus language compression is a second prevalent contradiction. Extended reporting of major events is now the norm. Column inches have increased, and newspaper pages have multiplied. Numerous extra links are available on the web, so that multiple aspects of a story can be explored. Television reports can be accessed round the clock. Yet at the same time, compression of information is a major feature. Headlines summarize a whole event in a few words, and dense noun phrases pack a variety of descriptive facts into a small portion of a sentence. Part I Modern media discourse Bell shows that changes in technology have affected journalistic practice. Over the years, the main medium changed, from newspapers to television, and the lapse of time between an event and its reporting shrank dramatically, from months to minutes – though the need for scoops and keeping to deadlines remained constant Cameron suggests that discourse styles have spread across different cultures, even when separate languages are used. An appearance of friendliness and informality seems to be a goal which transcends the languages concerned. Lakoff discusses whether political and other types of public discourse have grown coarser and less civil. Concern has been expressed, particularly in America, over apparently deepening levels of bitterness between members of each political party and their adversaries.A growing number of issues are found in which one side feels that the other is unwilling to listen, and words felt to be vulgar are thought to be on the increase.Taking a hostile position is perceived to be smarter and more interesting than seeking out mutual agreement. When these concerns were examined, Lakoff found that hostile confrontations were by no means new, though the style in which these hostilities were expressed had shifted in recent years. Snoddy examines a number of widespread beliefs about the media which turn out to be groundless myths. For example, he debunks the predictions that traditional newspapers are about to fade away, that English will become the dominant language of the internet, and that globalization will lead to sameness. Conboy investigates the language of the tabloid press. He outlines the development of a vernacular idiom, and the compression of the world into oversimple conceptual and linguistic categories such as punks, nuts and perverts. 1 Poles apart Globalization and the development of news discourse across the twentieth century Allan Bell Introduction In this chapter, I take the media reporting of two expeditions to the South Pole as a case study in the development of news discourse across the twentieth century. The ways in which their news reached the world illustrate three related issues in the globalization of international communication: 1) how technology changed the time and place dimensions of news delivery across the twentieth century (e.g. how fast the news is received, and through what medium); 2) the consequent and concomitant shifts in news presentation (e.g. written versus live televized coverage); 3) associated changes in how humans have understood time and place across the century – that is, the reorganization of time and place in late modernity (Giddens 1991; Bell 1999). The chapter’s theme is the way in which time and place are being reconfigured in contemporary society, and the role played in that process by changing communications technology, journalistic practice and news language. Captain Scott: 1912–13 The most obvious differences to a modern newspaper are visual – the absence of illustration, the small type even for headlines, the maintenance of column structure, and so on. What differs from later news discourse structure is that in 1913 the information was scattered among a myriad of short stories. Each sub- event has a separate story, which contemporary coverage in this kind of newspaper would now tend to incorporate into fewer, longer stories. All the information is there, and the categories of the discourse are the same, but the way they are realized and structured has shifted. The headlines – not something one would see in a newspaper at the start of the twenty-first century - are in fact telling the story. In some cases they refer to other, sidebar stories separate from the story above which they are placed. By contrast the modern headline usually derives entirely from the lead sentence of the story below it (Bell 1991), and certainly not from any information beyond the body copy of that story. That is, there is a qualitative shift in this aspect of news discourse structure across the century, from multiple decks of headlines outlining the story, to one to three headlines which are derivable from the lead sentence, with the story being told in the body copy. Looking at the changes our mythical modern headline editor would have made, we can see both linguistic and social shifts: (a) The ideological frame has changed – there is no longer just the ‘official narrative’, but the official becomes one account among others. (b) The discourse structure has moved from multiple-decked headlines which almost tell the story, to single, short, telegraphic headlines which summarize the lead sentence. (c) The lexicon has moved on. Some words strike as archaic less than 100 years later, for others length makes them out of place in a headline and they are replaced by shorter, punchier items. (d) The syntax also has tightened. Function words drop out, there is a shift to emphasize action and agency through ‘by’ and the introduction of verbs. An entire clausal structure (‘that’ + subjunctive) has become obsolete. Journalistically speaking, then, the news has become harder, the language tighter. television, and of these the overwhelming majority were about Radio Four. Complaints varied hugely: some about too much background noise, a few about poor delivery, a facetious tone, language in plays being ‘too difficult’, others attacking standards of grammar and pronunciation; larger numbers, perhaps some 40 or so letters or phone-calls a month, complained of ‘bad language’, particularly language regarded as ‘obscene’ or ‘blasphemous’, or complained of general immorality in plays ‘obsessed’ with sex. What impact did these unending complaints have? Summaries of the correspondence were circulated among senior managers each week, and fears were regularly expressed by programme-makers that they gave the impression that no one liked any of the programmes. The Director of Programmes replied reassuringly that it was appreciated that complaints in general were ‘indicative of the letter-writing temperament rather than the public mood as a whole’ (BBC Weekly Programme Review Board (WPRB) 19 May 1971, 1 March 1972). There is, indeed, plenty of evidence that many of the complaints from listeners about language were systematically, and quite properly, discounted within the BBC as misrepresentative.‘There may well be’, one BBC policy document says, ‘a tendency to condemn changes in the use of words less for the changes themselves than for other changes in society which they may reflect’. The thinking of the public was summarized thus: ‘if only the rude words would go away, then society would be different, that is, better’ (BBC R101, 1971). All this chimes with much of the listeners’ own discourse, which has as an underlying theme, the need for Radio Four to act as a safe haven in the stormy sea of social change. The Director of Programmes concluded that ‘laxer standards in television programmes made the audience much more sensitive to examples of even mild departures from more traditional standards on radio’ (BBC WPRB, 1971).There is also a subtext of revulsion at the wave of ‘gloomy’ news coverage of industrial unrest, drugs busts and student protests. Countless letters complained of ‘dull, dreary’ news programmes, and argued that ‘intolerably morbid and depressing’ plays offered little relief (BBC R34, 1968). Programmes on Radio Four were also making more and more use of ‘actuality inserts’ in which the detached tones of BBC announcers were now accompanied by soundbites of interviews with the participants of news events – people whose voices and words were inevitably partial, opinionated and sometimes incoherent. Complaint, Radio Four’s Controller Tony Whitby observed, was often a reaction against ‘the appearance on air of non- professionals’, whose opinions and voices were taken to be representative of the BBC itself; sometimes, too, the whole obsession with language by some listeners was simply ‘an excuse for ventilating their marked bias’ against any programmes featuring the working classes (BBC WPRB, 1971). Loyalty to listeners The constant flow of listeners’ complaints may have been met with a healthy dose of scepticism, but it could not fail to have some chastening effect. It was gradually acknowledged that more programmes in the ‘middle area’ were needed to ‘give predictable pleasure to traditional Home Service listeners’. Over time, indeed, more care appeared to be taken over securing the loyalty of existing Radio Four listeners than in attracting new ones. Indeed, despite periodic talk of boosting programmes in the ‘middle area’, the trend appears, if anything, to have been towards consolidating the audience of ‘opinion-formers’, even if that meant losing some of the easy-going ways of the old Home Service. . . . Far from watering down serious Radio, we believe we should seek ways of making it more authoritative. (Managing Director of Radio, Ian Trethowan, in BBC R78, 1973) Radio Four, Trethowan declared, was ‘the one part of the Radio output which is heard regularly by leading people in public life’, and it was here that the standing of BBC Radio at large, its ‘stature and authority’ would be judged (BBC R101, 1972). There were, then, firm limits to the extent to which Radio Four would pander to the preference of its listeners for ‘unpretentious’ and undemanding fare, for the views of influential critics and broadcasting professionals bore down even harder on decision-making. Publicity for radio in a television age has been a scarce commodity, and the judgements of the radio critics – judgements that mostly concern Radio Four programmes – feed the wider nexus of critical ‘opinion’ by which the BBC’s reputation as a whole has been judged. A noble failure Thus it was that the biggest publicity drive in BBC Radio history was launched in 1971 to alert critics to The Long March of Everyman – a twenty-six-part epic history of the British people. Its producers hoped to ‘recapture’ history from the elitists, to offer a programme where we heard the voices of ‘Us’ rather than ‘Them’. It would also be an adventure in the use of sound itself, a ‘montage’ with human voices. Unfortunately, when the series began, critics derided its lack of chronology and its failure to provide references. This is a perceptive reading of the audience’s tastes, for even in 1971 Radio Four’s Controller recognized that montage techniques, with their lack of narrative signposting, probably demanded ‘too much’ of most listeners. Yet, radio producers were – and still are – drawn to elevating the medium to the status of ‘sound cinema’. This is, suggests Raban,‘the desire to be sui generis, to be able to do something quite different from practitioners in any other literary or dramatic field’ (1981: 84). The Long March, then, brings us back to a central dilemma for Radio Four. BBC politics dictated that the network had to be seen to be stretching the audience, providing ‘quality’ and programmes of ‘stature’. The tenor of British cultural life also made it difficult, the BBC itself admitted, to allow ‘the middle-class drawing room of 1950 . . . to set the tone of broadcast speech’ in the 1970s (BBC R101, 1971). But how could it move on to more adventurous territory without its notoriously conservative listeners losing patience? The Long March appears to have been a noble failure in getting its tone right. But across Radio Four as a whole, there is every sign of a sincere attempt to steer a middle course that might nudge the network forward at glacier-like speed. Types of listener There was, though, another longer-term strategy solidifying – a strategy based on recognizing different types of listening among the Radio Four audience. But such dedicated listening was acknowledged to be very different indeed to the distracted background listening that has typified our experience of radio in the television age. We call radio a ‘secondary’ medium precisely because we get on with other things while listening. Another phrase which we find is the ‘motivated’ listener – someone the programme-maker can expect to be paying decent attention to what is being said – and who contrasts with the ‘general’ listener – someone unlikely to absorb anything too complex and ‘continuous’. These are not necessarily different people, but probably the same people listening at different times of the day; for while television’s evening watershed is based on a distinction between family and adult viewing, radio’s watershed marks the boundary between mass listenership and a minority one, with the minority presumed to have opted deliberately for more demanding, perhaps more linguistically adventurous, programming. So: did the centre hold? Not quite. Radio Four has indeed avoided the extremes of language – of Third Programme complexity and of pop-radio simplicity – in talking to its listeners. By default, and by design, it occupies a linguistic middle ground, talking to what it sees as an educated, curious lay audience. Even so, its manner of address is not quite uniform, for it recognizes, too, that the circumstances of listening vary, and that this allows for – indeed demands – a ‘separating out’ of programme styles wherever the competing demands of upper-middlebrow and lower-middlebrow modes of address cannot quite be bridged. (In terms of today’s Radio Four schedules, I think it fair to argue that an edition of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time devoted to Greek philosophy is very different in its linguistic, aural and intellectual demands to, say, a slice of the Today programme that precedes it.). Radio Four might not escape the ‘middlebrow’ label, but that tag now almost certainly encompasses a wider range of language than was once offered by the nostalgically remembered Home Service. Part IV The effect of the media on language This section looks at ways in which the practices of the media might be affecting our speech or written records. Ni compares the use of noun phrases in editorials and news reports with those in other linguistic registers. He finds that the structure of noun phrases in media texts falls mid-way between academic writing and conversation. Biber shows how space constraints within newspapers have led to dense, structurally complex noun phrases which cram in maximum information.This style may be spreading to other areas of English. Ayto explores English neologisms, and the extent to which they are accepted in modern dictionaries. He finds that blends, such as brunch from ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch’ vary in the extent to which they are accepted by dictionaries. He finds that dictionaries which contain the greatest number are those which have used a large number of newspapers as sources of data. Simpson discusses linguistic sources of data for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). He discusses the extent to which tabloids and emails might be regarded as reliable evidence sources for dictionaries. Printed sources, whatever they may be, are acceptable, he claims, though he points out the difficulties, at present insuperable, of using non- printed sources, such as emails. 16 Noun phrases in media texts A quantificational approach Yibin Ni Introduction This study intends to capture the particular stylistic features of the three types of news media texts, printed editorials, printed news reports and broadcast news, in terms of a series of linguistic indicators in the noun phrases embedded in the texts. These media texts are distinguished along parameters such as written vs. spoken and descriptive vs. argumentative. In doing so, this study examines noun phrases for their syntactic complexity, e.g. whether they take modifiers and how many modifiers they take if they do (e.g. water vs. the fresh water in the Scottish highlands) and the semantically different pre-modifiers they take, e.g. classifiers or descriptors (wooden box vs. wooden actor).The indicators chosen for the study are shown to be significant in distinguishing registers and are able to account for many of the stylistic differences. The present project makes use of data collected during the 1990s for the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) (Greenbaum 1996), in particular, the news media texts versus the other three paradigmatic registers: academic writing, fiction and conversations. The study of the structure of noun phrases and their effects on the style of a register Noun phrases (NPs) are strings of words with an internal structure centred around an obligatory head, which may be supplemented by determiners, pre-modifiers and post-modifiers. A complex noun phrase with various kinds of modifiers can package a relatively large amount of information, which would otherwise have required several clauses with less elaborately modified NPs. Modifiers may make the referent more specific, or make the speaker’s feelings and attitudes towards the referent explicit. Both the syntactic and semantic characteristics of a noun phrase contribute significantly to the style that a certain register assumes. Syntactically, informational content may be packaged more or less densely by the use of different NP heads and the use of noun phrases with different levels of complexity in terms of the number of modifiers they contain. (For example, in a register with an interpersonal focus such as private conversation, pronouns are much more frequently used than complex NPs in a news bulletin). The stylistic characteristics of news media texts Biber and his colleagues pointed out that a high concentration of nouns, attributive adjectives and prepositional phrases serving as post-modifiers in a text indicates that the text has an ‘informational focus’, rather than an interpersonal one. In this section, the distribution patterns of the chosen linguistic indicators