hi

[Linnea Micciulla]

Hi Wafa',

I agree that what the authors (Kitis & Malapides) set out to accomplish - to show how ideological biases are hidden in the syntax, lexical choices and pragmatics of a text - is an exciting, important, critical task.  But I have the impression that they used their own ideological biases to read things into the text that arguably weren't there.  The result it that, for some of us at least, the analysis isn't credible.  For example, their conclusion that "Greece's defense just seems silly" = "Greece is silly" was not valid for either John or me.  John even pointed to research that would indicate the opposite is true!  So a very important question for us to ask at this point, I think, is:  How could this have been avoided?

Here are some ideas:
1) Since the authors are analysing the way Greece/Macedonia are going to be perceived based on the text, I think it would help their case to do some psycholinguistic research.  Present people with a series of statements using the syntactic/lexical/pragmatic patterns to be analysed:

1a. That guy is nice.
1b. That guy seems nice.
2a. That company is corrupt.
2b. That company seems corrupt.

For the authors to simply claim that "seems" creates a stronger impression than "be" is not convincing.  But if they interview a pool of subjects, using the structure in a variety of contexts, and find a significant tendency, then I would be more willing to accept their interpretation.

If they don't do this research themselves, at least cite someone who has.  For example, there has been research conducted on the assignation of blame by readers of news articles about violence against women, depending on whether a passive or active structure is used.  (I don't have the reference handy, but if anyone is interested, let me know and I'll look it up for you.)

2) Don't select the text that supports your position and ignore the text that doesn't.  For example, the authors talk about representation of the source of quotes, which is an excellent point for analysis.  They contrast a quote from the Greek FM which is cut up into pieces and tied together with the journalist's words, with a quote from a Macedonian minister which is presented intact. The authors are absolutely right to point this out.  However, later in the text there is a quote from the Greek FM that includes 2 full sentences without the interruption of the journalist's words.  The most the Macedonian minister gets in a single quote is a single sentence.  And overall, the Greek authories have more direct quotes than the Macedonian.  If the larger context of the text is ignored, focusing on just those two quotes is not convincing.  The authors need to acknowledge the big picture, and then explain why the 2 quotes they analyze show bias within the larger picture.

3) Describe your framework of analysis clearly up front.  I found it confusing that there was so much sporadic citation of so many authors representing so many theories throughout the paper.  Speech act theory was well-represented, some classic semantic theory, as well as a number of CDA theorists with various perspectives.  But there didn't seem to be a well-defined framework; it seemed more like quotes from different sources were thrown in, out of their original context, whenever they appeared to support the point in progress.  That also made me a little more skeptical of the whole endeavor.

Despite all of my criticism, I do think that analyses supporting the goals Kitis & Milapides set out to achieve are much needed, and I found reading and discussing this article to be quite useful.

What do you think about adding the article Brendan suggested to our reading list?  :)

Linnea



>It was very rich and I have really
> enjoied reading it . The concepts that I am looking
> for were vivdly elaborated viz. versions
> of reality , the news discourse as having an
> argumentative structure , different representation
> of
> reality , stylistic variation in news genre , etc. .
> I found myself sharing the authors of this article
> the same ideas and perspectives especially those
> related to " higher-level organizational features "
> : rhetorical structures , semantic and pragmatic
> relations of the text and how they can affect the
> interpretation of it .
>  I agree with them that the whole text has a
> dennotative function but what I am amazed
> from is that there was no mention ( explicit ) of
> Intetionality of the writer , because I am trying to
> give it a good weigh in my reseach which is
> surprisingly similar to my study of  Different
> Versions of Reality in English News Discourse .

>  Wafa'