Halmari and Ostman (2001)

[Linnea Micciulla]

Hi everyone,

Noriko, thanks for your thoughts on the last articles.  For some reason, I
am never able to get to these things so far ahead of time!! I would be quite
interested in hearing your thoughts on "On newspaper headlines as relevance
optimizers" Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003). I've been doing some work with
large corpora, and it strikes me that analysing headlines only may be a good
approach for covering salient text presented to readers over a long period
of time.

I agree with your thoughts about the social/economic influence on discourse.
 I think that was implicit in the article, since the authors mentioned that
the economy of the town, and thus the newspaper, depended on the execution
business.  Understanding economic factors controlling the media certainly
help put analyses in context.

I thought that most of the analysis was well-done and convincing.  The
authors made good use of a large number of examples, which I believe is
important since it supports their argument that there is an implicit bias.
(A small number of examples could be passed off as anomalies.) I would,
however, have liked an explanation or at least some examples of the
"implicit or explicit anchoring" that they referred to so often, to help
people like me who haven't read Ostman's dissertation.

Linnea


On Thu, 12 May 2005 11:51:22 +0900,
=?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCP3k/ORsoQiAbJEJFNTtSGyhC?= <n_sugimori at YAHOO.CO.JP> wrote:

>Hi everyone,
>
>In the following, I would like to write my thoughts on Teo
>(2000) and Halmari and Ostman (2001). I also would like to
>introduce a book on ESL and politics.
>
>On Teo (2000)
>Teo (2000) wrote,  $B!H (B. . . how the active choices made n
>the way newspaper headlines, leads and captions are
>couched can have a very powerful ideological effect on
>readers
> $B!G (B perception and interpretation of people and events. $B!I (B
>Linnea pointed out that Teo had written so without
>reporting any actual perceptions of any readers.
>Investigating readers
> $B!G (B own perception and linguists $B!G (B language ideology is a
>promising next step because linguists are neutral.
>
>I have also encountered discrepancies between headlines
>and the contents of newspaper articles. I have found an
>articles,
> $B!H (BOn newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers $B!I (B in
>Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003). I hope that reading this
>article is helpful in understanding this issue. Although I
>have not read it, I will let you know if I find something
>interesting.
>
>On Halmari and Ostman (2001)
>Our new reading  $B!H (BThe soft-spoken, angelic pick ax killer:
>The notion of discourse pattern in controversial news
>reporting
> $B!I (B by Helena Halmari and Jan-Ola Ostman (Journal of
>Pragmatics 33:805-823) was an interesting read. Karla Faye
>Tucker, who had killed two people in the 1980s, was
>executed in Texas in 1998. The authors examined the local
>newspaper (The Huntsville Item) before and after the
>execution. In Huntsville, the prison was the main
>employer. Because Karla Faye Tucker became the first woman
>executed in the 20th century and she was a born-again
>Christian, this case was widely reported. At the surface
>level this local newspaper appeared to be neutral by
>printing both pro- and anti- opinions about the execution.
>But these authors uncovered that The Huntsville Item
>supported the pro-execution view. The authors
> $B!G (B focus was the relationship among discourse pattern,
>genre, and text types, etc.
>
>However, I was more intrigued by surrounding social
>issues. Why did this pro-execution discourse come into
>being and persists in the town in Texas? Why does the
>newspaper support execution over life imprisonment?  It is
>known that execution actually costs more than life
>imprisonment. Spending more can be interpreted as more
>economic gain for the town because more government
>spending benefits the local economy. Nowadays many
>researchers try to explain the change in the direction of
>discourse in terms of economy. Some researchers criticize
>this trend by arguing that the emphasis on economy has
>always been the case.  I wonder if it is interesting to
>examine the newspaper reports on this topic
>longitudinally, paying more attention to the changing
>economic influence of the prison on the town.
>
>A book on ESL and politics
>Some member mentioned that she was interested in political
>aspects of ESL. I have just read an extremely interesting
>book on this topic. Christine Pearson Casanave & Stephanie
>Vandrick (eds.) Writing for Scholarly Publication: Behind
>the Scenes in Language Education. Lawrence Erlbaum. 2003
>
>Regards,
>
>Noriko
>
>
>
>Noriko Sugimori
>20 Chestnut Street #204, Cambridge, MA 02139
>tel & fax 617-494-6497
> $B?y?9E5;R (B
> $B") (B939-8051  $BIY;3;TBg at tCfIt#1#2#3!!=)K\J} (B
>tel & fax 076-421-1337