30.2362, Diss: Discourse Analysis: Diana ben-Aaron: ''Given and News: media discourse and the construction of community on national days''

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-2362. Thu Jun 06 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.2362, Diss:  Discourse Analysis: Diana ben-Aaron: ''Given and News: media discourse and the construction of community on national days''

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Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2019 16:27:26
From: Diana ben-Aaron [diana.benaaron at gmail.com]
Subject: Given and News: media discourse and the construction of community on national days

 
Institution: University of Helsinki 
Program: Department of English 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2005 

Author: Diana ben-Aaron

Dissertation Title: Given and News: media discourse and the construction of
community on national days 

Dissertation URL:  https://www.academia.edu/1850690/Given_and_news_Media_discourse_and_the_con

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis


Dissertation Director(s):
Jan-Ola Östman

Dissertation Abstract:

National anniversaries such as independence days demand precise coordination
in order to make citizens change their routines to forego work and spend the
day at rest or at festivities that provide social focus and spectacle. The
complex social construction of national days is taken for granted and operates
as a given in the news media, which are the main agents responsible for
coordinating these planned disruptions of normal routines. This study examines
the language used in the news to construct the rather unnatural idea of
national days and to align people in observing them. The data for the study
consist of news stories about the Fourth of July in the New York Times,
sampled over 150 years and are supplemented by material from other sources and
other countries. The study is multidimensional, applying concepts from
pragmatics (speech acts, politeness, information structure), systemic
functional linguistics (the interpersonal metafunction and the Appraisal
framework) and cognitive linguistics (frames, metaphor) as well as journalism
and communications to arrive at an interdisciplinary understanding of how
resources for meaning are used by writers and readers of the news stories.

In the course of the investigation, methods are developed for analyzing large
collections of newspaper content, particularly topical soft news and feature
materials that have hitherto been considered less influential and worthy of
study than so-called hard news. In his work on evaluation in newspaper
stories, White (1998) proposed that the classic hard news story is focused on
an event that threatens the social order, but news of holidays and
celebrations in general does not fit this pattern, in fact its central event
is a reproduction of the social order. Thus in the system of news values
(Galtung and Ruge 1965), national holiday news draws on “ground” news values
such as continuity and predictability rather than “figure” news values such as
negativity and surprise. It is argued that this ground helps form a necessary
space for hard news to be seen as important, similar to the way in which the
information structure of language is seen to rely on the regular alternation
of given and new information (Chafe 1994).




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