16.1115, Review: Socioling/Genre Analysis: Aitchison & Lewis (2003)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1115. Thu Apr 07 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1115, Review: Socioling/Genre Analysis: Aitchison & Lewis (2003)

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1)
Date: 06-Apr-2005
From: Andy Van Drom < andy.van.drom at skynet.be >
Subject: New Media Language 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 22:34:31
From: Andy Van Drom < andy.van.drom at skynet.be >
Subject: New Media Language 
 

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EDITORS: Aitchison, Jean; Lewis, Diana
TITLE: New Media Language
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1157.html


Andy Van Drom, Department of Romance Languages, University of 
Antwerp

SYNOPSIS

'New Media Language', edited by Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis, 
is a volume that resulted from a conference on 'Language, the Media 
and International Communication' held at Oxford University in 2001.  It 
contains conference papers, complemented by selected other 
contributions.  The work aims to explore the relationship between 
language and the media from two perspectives: how does media 
language influence our view of reality, and how do the media affect 
language itself.  The book is divided into a short introduction and four 
themed sections, each of which embraces 5 articles.  Throughout the 
different sections, there are some recurring key issues, such 
as 'globalization vs. fragmentation' and 'linguistic expansion vs. 
language compression'.   

Section 1, 'Modern media discourse', focuses on how media and 
media communication have changed diachronically.  Bell ('Poles 
Apart') compares coverage of two expeditions to Antarctica, separated 
by almost a century.  He describes how technological changes have 
affected journalism.  Television was able to report the arrival of the 
1999 expedition within minutes, whereas in 1912, it took months 
before any news was published in the papers.  After an analysis of the 
topoi presented in both reports, Bell concludes that even though news 
presentation and discourse have changed dramatically, news values 
have stayed the same.

Snoddy addresses 'Modern media myths' in his article.  He denies 
various "myths" that attribute more power to the new media, and 
favours traditional mass media.  To this end, he cites examples such 
as the failure of the "Tablet", a portable-screen that was to replace 
newspapers; the difficulties that arise with the implementation of 
portable, digital media; and the need for global media groups such as 
MTV to create regional editions.  His article is also a defence for 
public service broadcasting.

In 'Globalizing communication', Cameron addresses the spread of 
English, not as a "language", but as a "discourse style".  She argues 
that even though people will still speak their native language, they will 
adopt a communication style that is based on English, and more 
specifically, American standards.  She provides examples of 
dissemination mechanisms, such as global mass media, commercial 
institutions, and talk shows.  Cameron remarks that according to this 
approach, we should all aim for the same communication model to 
facilitate intercomprehension, whereas sociolinguists have always 
identified the capability of individuals to vary their communication style 
to suit different situations.

In her article 'The new incivility', Lakoff studies the feeling of growing 
incivility or "coarsening" of political discourse.  She first identifies this 
phenomenon in six key points.  In a second phase, she situates the 
identified behaviour in a historical context, and concludes that even 
during the Roman Empire, this was attested.  In her conclusion, Lakoff 
widens the scope, and integrates this language "trend" in a social 
analysis: "... a decline in civility actually represents an increase in 
democracy, and the enrichment of public discourse with radically new 
opinions...".

Conboy investigates the language of the British tabloid press 
in 'Parochialising the Global'.  He outlines the development of 
community building strategies such as the development of a 
vernacular idiom and the use of compressed nominal phrases, 
which "seem to be making political and social news available for the 
average reader" and shift language "from reporting to an engaged 
and often enraged personalization". 

Section 2, 'Modes of the media', looks at the various ways in which 
media discourse is realized nowadays (synchronically).  Carey 
('Reportage, literature and willed credulity') explores the relationship 
between literature and reportage.  He introduces the notion of "willed 
credulity", which distinguishes reportage from fiction, since we often 
have no other means of verifying the truth of stories.  Carey compares 
the role of reportage today with that of religion in the past, both 
appealing to "willed credulity" to obtain validity, and both providing us 
with stories and meanings to situate our personal world in a larger 
universe.   

Hendy looks at the language used by BBC Radio Four in 'Speaking to 
Middle England'.  Whereas most broadcasters adapt their language to 
the target audience, BBC Four as heir to the National Programme, has 
struggled to find a suitable 'voice', a "linguistic middleground" to 
address its wide range of listeners.  Hendy concludes that this is not 
always possible, and points out differences in language use between 
the various programmes.

Kesseler and Bergs look at love messages in SMS and e-mail format 
in their article 'Literacy and the new media'.  They claim that the cliché 
of a love letter is a misconception based on a particular type of letter 
written by important historical figures.  Even though the medium 
influences the shape of the message (SMS is limited to 160 
characters), the authors show that in comparison with nineteenth 
century love letters, the same images and metaphors are still used.

In 'Why email looks like speech', Baron looks at "e-style" and how it 
relates to other discourse styles.  She finds that "email resembles 
speech because writing in general has become more speech-like, 
thanks in part to conscious pedagogical decisions and in part to 
changing social attitudes about how we present ourselves to others."  
Email is then an example "of the growing attitude towards writing as a 
medium that does not require attention to public face".

Lewis describes how online media change the shape of news 
coverage in 'Online news'.  She identifies some specific 
characteristics, such as the integration of writing, sound, image and 
video, and the accumulation of an unlimited amount of information in a 
single space.  According to Lewis, this "removes the need for a 'basic 
level' of story", thus "weakening the boundaries between stories".  
Narratives become shorter, and integrate into larger and more 
complex structures than traditional news articles.

Section 3, 'Representations and models', investigates how the 
representation of a topic can influence the audience's perception of it.  
Gluck ('Wine language') examines the descriptions of wines.  He 
discusses the difficulty of this, and shows how the role and use of 
metaphors and prototypes can change, depending on the target 
audience of the expert. 

In his article 'Rhetoric, bluster and on-line gaffes', Partington looks at 
the communication between the spokespersons ("spin-doctors") and 
the press ("wolf-pack") at White House briefings.  After analysing the 
techniques that both parties use to communicate, he compares his 
findings to the art of rhetoric.  The term 'spin' is for him merely "a new 
name for an old game".

Wei describes the metaphors used in the news coverage of 
Taiwanese political discourse ('Politics is marriage and show 
business').  Whereas in the western society, politics are often 
associated with metaphors of war and sports, Taiwanese politics tend 
to be described with vocabulary of marriage, finance, and costumes.  
These "have profound influence in the political process".

Lorenzo-Dus and Davies both focus on talk shows in their respective 
articles 'Emotional DIY and proper parenting in "Kilroy"' and 'Language 
and American "good taste"'.  Lorenzo-Dus studies how the language 
use of the talkshow host Kilroy, in combination with discursive 
strategies such as reformulations and specific questions, favour a 
certain image of the 'ideal family'.  Davies does not focus on a set of 
values that the host tries to impose on the audience, but on the values 
he, or in this case, she, tries to embody.  The author analyses the 
linguistic strategies of Martha Stewart in this context.  She 
distinguishes three frames that Stewart adopts through the use of 
language: politeness, credibility and authenticity, each of which she 
details with specific examples.

Section 4, 'The effect of the media on language', looks at ways in 
which the practices of the media affect our use of language.  Ni ('Noun 
phrases in media texts') approaches the use of noun phrases in 
editorials and news reports from a quantificational point of view.  More 
specifically, he examines noun phrases "for their syntactic complexity, 
e.g. whether they take modifiers and how many modifiers they take if 
they do".  He concludes that the structure of noun phrases in the 
media is situated in the middle of academic writing and conversation.

In his article 'Compressed noun-phrase structures in newspaper 
discourse', Biber demonstrates how newspaper prose has evolved in 
two opposite directions.  On one hand, we can see the development 
of more popular oral styles in comparison to nineteenth century 
articles, on the other hand, compressed noun-phrase structures have 
to assure the restraint of news volume.  A result of this more 
compressed style is a loss of explicitness in meaning.

Ayto explores the field of neologisms in 'Newspapers and 
neologisms'.  He concentrates on the adoption in dictionaries 
of "blends", such as brunch from [breakfast + lunch].  He concludes 
that dictionaries based on newspapers as data sources, contain a 
vaster amount of these types of neologisms.   Even though it is 
impossible to determine whether a journalist is the source of the 
neologism, it is safe to say that the press facilitate its distribution.

Simpson discusses the problem of media as data sources for 
dictionaries in his contribution 'Reliable authority'.  Whereas printed 
sources, whatever their nature (articles, film scripts, song lyrics) are 
generally accepted by dictionaries as "witnesses" of the use of a word 
or expression, the reliability of on-line sources seems more 
problematic as it is hard to judge which texts are "more established, 
and better archived, than others".

Aitchison closes the volume with an article on the vocabulary of 
terrorism.  In 'From Armageddon to war' she investigates if the events 
of 9-11 triggered "exceptional language".  After analysing press 
coverage, she finds that even though a specialist, mostly polysyllabic, 
vocabulary was used to describe these events, most of the words 
used existed already in the English language, and their heightened 
frequency was only temporary.  

EVALUATION

In this evaluation, the focus will be on the publication as a whole, as 
this intended unity is emphasized repeatedly. The work is presented 
as a "users' manual", its structure is built on four "cornerstone 
sections", in which the different contributions are represented 
as "chapters".  The above synopsis has clearly displayed the diversity 
of topics and approaches that this volume contains.  This diversity 
undoubtedly is the collection's greatest merit and strength, providing 
the reader with valuable introductions, opinions and references that 
stimulate further reading and reflection.  Yet at the same time, it also 
uncovers the collection's greatest flaw.  Whilst offering a wide range of 
opinions will certainly capture the interest of an equally wide range of 
readers, the organization and integration of these texts can indeed be 
delicate and complicated.  

The difficulty of presenting this collection as a unity becomes clear 
even before opening the book, more specifically, when reflecting on 
the title, which I found rather ambiguous.  In a time where 'New media' 
("a term describing the digital delivery of media via the Internet, DVD, 
and digital television" - Harries (2002)) are a hot topic, I had expected 
this book to focus on the 'language of the new media'.  Reading the 
back cover, I realized that the title could also be interpreted as 'new 
language of the media'.  After reading the volume, I am left with the 
feeling that the editors have deliberately exploited this ambiguity, as 
the articles in this collection seem to fill a continuum of approaches 
situated in between two poles, represented by the aforementioned 
interpretations. 

The book is introduced as "an accessible introduction to the study of 
sociolinguistics and the media".  However, the fact that the reader is 
not provided with a clear definition of the topic as reference-point, 
could be problematic for a non-specialist audience, and cause the 
reader to be unable to situate a specific article in a vaster background 
of sociolinguistic and media studies.  The contributors seem to base 
themselves on different definitions of the word "media". We can 
roughly distinguish the following meanings: whereas most articles 
focus on 'traditional news media' such as newspapers and television, 
others concentrate on 'new news media' such as the internet, or 'new 
media in general' such as email and SMS.  There is nothing against 
applying a wide scope approach to the theme of 'media'; nevertheless, 
it seems audacious to aim to give all these different viewpoints the 
attention they deserve within the limited space of 200 pages.

Another obstacle in perceiving this bundle as a coherent unity, is the 
fact that the lexical accessibility of the volume is not always 
consistent.  I admit that most articles are written in a very 
understandable, sometimes even entertaining manner.  Gluck's writing 
style would be the perfect example of this:
"What, then, are we wine writers trying to hide?  Answer: our struggle 
to communicate."

On the other hand, some authors use a specialist lexicon, which is not 
always sufficiently explained to be fully comprehended by a non-
specialist audience.  An example from the article by Partington (p. 
121) will illustrate this: 
"Probably the single most striking rhetorical device to be found in the 
podium's language is the use of lexico-syntactic parallelism 
(or 'isocolon' in classical rhetoric)".  

This problem could have been avoided, for example by the inclusion 
of a glossary at the end of the volume.

Often in parallel with the variation between verbal simplicity and 
complexity of the articles, the actual scientific construction of the 
presented ideas is not always of the same level.  Some articles 
present sound research to support the conclusions made by the 
author (e.g. the quantificational approach of Ni), others give rather 
personal opinions (e.g. Snoddy (p. 26): "And when we all have multi-
channel digital devices, I believe there will still be a need for public 
service broadcasting", or are limited to a non-critical account of a 
certain phenomenon, such as Gluck citing the metaphors that are 
commonly used to describe wines.

Apart from the inconsistencies relating to form and style, I miss cross-
referencing between the various contributions, or at the very least, a 
more elaborate introduction and conclusion.  Some authors formulate 
opposite ideas: Snoddy denies that new media have a big impact on 
the way we communicate, whilst Lewis argues that online media do 
change the way that news is presented.  Other articles seem to 
suggest similar conclusions, whether they are explicitly or implicitly 
formulated.  The findings of Cameron, Lorenzo-Dus and Davies 
indicate for instance that mass media can facilitate the global 
dissemination and influence of the English language and more 
covertly, Anglo-Saxon communication strategies and social values.  I 
believe that pointing this out would have been a great surplus value 
for the edited collection as a whole, all the more since these 
contributions are situated in different sections of the book, making it 
less obvious for the reader to spot these relations.

In conclusion, for me, the strength and value of this volume lie in the 
diversity of its individual articles, written by an interesting mix of 
scholars and media professionals.  However, the desire to integrate 
this diversity into a single framework is the work's main flaw.  The 
volume is prominently presented as a whole, and the structure 
consisting of four sections tries to formalize that.  I feel that this 
coherence is not always present with respect to the content and style; 
and that, for lack of a reflective conclusion that provides the reader 
with some necessary cross-referencing, the arrangement of the 
sections may even hinder the identification of articles that have a 
certain degree of correlation.  Whilst every reader will focus on one or 
more articles depending on their own research interests, I believe that 
language professionals, students and laymen alike will at the very 
least enjoy reading the broad range of views presented in this varied 
and interesting collection.

REFERENCES

Dan Harries (Ed.), 2002, 'The New Media Book', London, Bfi 
Publishing. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Andy Van Drom is currently preparing a dissertation on the application 
and the perception of a regional linguistic standard in the press of 
Quebec.  He will further explore the Quebecois theme in ensuing 
Ph.D. research on the use of regionalisms in political discourse as a 
linguistic identity-constructing strategy.





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