Scarica riassunto libro investigating media discourse e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity!
INVESTIGATING MEDIA DISCOURSE – O’KEEFFE
INTRODUCTION (capitolo 1) Media discourse is a broad term which can refer to a totality of how reality is represented in broadcast and printed media, from television to newspaper. Media discourse refers to political interviews, chat shows, radio phone-ins, and so on, where two people are interacting and an audience is listening. Interviews have moved from being prescripted to being more and more ‘naturalistic’. Corner (1991) provides an insight into the evolution of the media interview, particularly within documentaries. He attributes the change and development in the mid- to late- 1950s, where interviews became more immediate and natural. This development freed the programme makers from the limitations of studio treatments. The interview was not yet a means of extracting painful or revealing information. His job was to discover some very simple facts. The broadcast interview was an interaction in which the function of the interviewer provided a series of topic headings “for the carefully prepared views of famous men and women which they conveyed to their viewers or listeners” (Wedell 1968). The monopoly of deferential interviewing style promoted by the BBC was undermined with the advent of independent television (I T V) in the mid-1950s in the UK. ITV contributed to a more direct, searching and penetrating style of interviewing. MEDIA INTERACTIONS AND CASUAL CONVERSATION Media interactions as essentially conversations that are heard by others, and the notion of having a conversation that is overheard is not a new phenomenon. This ‘overhearing’ model is too narrow for media discourse. When a presenter and an interviewee interact on television or radio, they do so with the knowledge not only that they are being overheard, but also that they are having a conversation in front of an audience. In this way, they are having a different kind of conversation than two people talking on a train beside others who cannot avoid hearing their conversation. The former requires inclusion and involvement of the audience, the latter very often requires exclusion (e.g. through guarded or coded references) and detachment (e.g. lack of eye contact and lack of inclusive reference). A media interaction takes place in front of an audience, so it must draw on a broad heritage of shared knowledge, while a casual conversation usually based on a narrow and local store of shared knowledge. According to Goffman , the notion of media interactions takes place in a participation framework constructed between the presenter/host/interviewer, the interviewee/guest/caller and the audience. Media interactions also differ from casual conversations in general because they take place in an institutional setting and thus result in institutionalized roles and
institutionalized turn-taking rights. Institutional power is vested in the presenter/host/interviewer. Other manifestations of the discoursal asymmetry include the ability of the power- role to decide when to raise a topic, when to change it and how, and even, to close the conversation. This institutionalized division of speaker roles , power and turns- taking rights is what distinguishes media interactions from everyday conversations. EXCHANGE STRUCTURES According to Sinclair and Coulthard , both casual conversation and media interactions include speaker turns and these constitute exchange structures. There are two types of exchange structures: Two-part : initiation → response (IR) Three-part : initiation → response → feedback (IRF) Exchange structures exist in both casual conversation and media interactions, but, the two-part exchange is more characteristic of media discourse. Beyond the structural level, we also find many common spoken discourse features in both casual conversation and media discourse. PRAGMATIC MARKERS According to Carter and McCarthy, pragmatic markers are some words which speaker uses to convey his message to a listener (some examples: I mean, I think, I do not know, well, actually and right). They include: hedges, discourse markers and interjections. HEDGING Hedging is a strategy frequently used in spoken and written language. a hedge is a word or phrase used in a sentence to express ambiguity, probability, caution, or indecisiveness. Hedges also include the use of a wide range of language, including vague language. They are commonly used when someone is expressing an opinion about something The words like: just , kind of , sort of and like often have this function. DISCOURSE MARKERS Discourse markers are another pragmatic feature common in everyday conversational language and in media interactions. The latter are used by the speaker for the organization, structuring and monitoring of the speech. These words or phrases normally in a conversation mark: the beginning of a story, the return to the point, the start, the change or the end of a topic or an interaction. Typical examples include: okay , right , so , well , now , oh , anyway ; but also phrasal items such as: as I was saying , getting back to..
the canonical structure of a phone call opening between unmarked form of relationship (not intimate, but not strangers): Summons answer – identification – greetings – how are you sequences, first topic. Wahlen and Zimmerman present the typical sequence call between strangers on an emergency phone line: Summons – answer - business of call Drew and Chilton call openings between intimate (corpus mother, daughter weekly call for keeping in touch): Summons – answer - identification/recognition- greetings – first topic. INTERACTION WITH UNKNOWN PERSONAE This type of interaction occurs in programs with solely phone calls, such as music shows and talk shows with calls from public. Radio interactions: When analyzing radio interactions Cameron and Hills found that the Shegloffs canonical structure was rivers in the roles of summoner and summoned. In a normal phone call the summoned doesn’t know the summoner identity , in the radio phone-ins the presenter (summoned) knows the summoners name, location, and reason of calling, so then the caller answers to their name summoned Summon – answer – greetings x Television interactions Talk show is a wide genre, making it uneasy to define. The rules of talkshow are shared by the community. Tabloid talk show is quasi-conversational and non-formal with generic features of both conversational and institutional genres. Gregory-Signes’ work is based on five major dimensions of conversation analysis: lexical choice , turn design , sequence organization , overall structure , social epistemology and social relations. INTERACTIONS WITH KNOWN PERSONAE Carbough makes a distinction between chat show interviews -personality focused- and talk shows - issues focused. McCarthy and Carter on British show ‘Wogan’ identify a number of discourse strategies used such as using a ‘conventional expression’ to take the interviewee back to an earlier question and expand the topic. Tolson defines “chat” as all forms of studio talk loosely based on protocols, but with presence of transgressions (interviewees putting questions to interviewer) He notes the ambivalence of to inform/entertain, serious/sincere, playfull/flippant. Chat as a speech genre:
- Content - focus on personal common cultural knowledge
- Higly self-reflexive , mental discourse about television , participants draw attention to the construction of their own performances
- dialogical improvisation – as jazz set POLITICAL INTERVIEW Rama Martines finds political interviews as information focused. Harris notes how politicians respond evasively, also sometimes they are constrained by the syntax of the question and they’re not free to ignore it with impunity. Clayman looks at how politicians use reformulation of the question to answer it, and to manipulate them by shifting the topic agenda, ignoring the second part, agreeing to the embedded preposition and not the main. CORPUS-BASED APPROACH Ajimer and Altenberg describe corpus linguistic as “the study of language on the basis of the text corpora”. It started to appear in 1960 due to advent of computer. A corpus is a large and principled collection of computerized texts in spoken or written form, analysed by corpus software packages. Corpus software facilitates word frequency list generation , concordance and cluster analysis : Word frequency list : is extremely quick to obtain a list of all the words in the entire collection of data. Concordancing: find every occurrence of a particular word or phrase, the search word is referred to as “the node” and concordance lines have the node word or phrase in the center of the line with 7/8 words on each side. They are scanned vertically at first glance. Cluster analysis : cluster lists, the most frequent combination of words: two words (I mean) , three words (I don’t know) four words (I don’t believe it), five words (you know what I mean) or six word (at the end of the day). MANAGING THE DISCOURSE (capitolo 4) INTRODUCTION One of the distinctive features of interactions in media discourse is that a participant, usually the presenter or guest, has more institutional power than others. With this power he has the task of guiding speech during the interaction. THE DISCOURSAL ROLES AND PERSONAE OF THE MEDIA In the context of academic writing, Tang and John (1999) distinguish three roles that a writercan take: societal role , discourse role and genre role. These distinctions can be adapted to the context of media discourse to understand its dynamics. The three roles can be summarized in: societal roles : those which are inherent to a person. For example: mother, father, daughter, American, Singaporean; discourse roles : the identities that a person acquires through participation in a discourse community. For example: a lawyer, a doctor, a patient, and so on;
Especially, in political interviews, the presenter usually aligns himself with the audience in the opening so as to frame the interview with necessary background information related to the guest and the subject of the interview. This opening alignment serves to bring the audience into the participation framework, but it can also be used to frame the interview in a certain way. In fact, this is an important part of the presenter’s genre role so that all participants can have the 'means' to be ratified hearers. INSTITUTIONAL POWER ROLES AND QUESTIONING The institutional contexts such as: political interviews , doctor–patient exchanges , courtroom , and classroom interactions ; are typified by a succession of questions. In all these cases, the speaker who has contextual status (e.g. lawyer in a courtroom, teacher in a classroom) normally controls the development of the discourse through questioning. Atkinson and Drew coined the term ‘turn-type pre-allocation’ , to refer to how participants in institutional discourse, entering into an institutional setting, are normatively constrained in the types of turns they may take according to their particular institutional roles. This format is pre-established, which means that participants can be constrained to stay within the boundaries of the question– answer framework. This is in contrast to casual conversation, where roles are not predetermined, and where the type and order of turns in an interaction can vary freely. In institutionalized interactions on television and radio , the presenter is usually the questioner and this preallocates a high level of managerial control. The presenter can ask the questions and can decide when to intervene with the next question. However this power can be challenged. Clayman and Heritage (2002) illustrate how interviewees can use response tokens as a means of intervening in the questioning process. They give the example from Dan Rather’s CBS news interview with the then American Vice President George Bush. Clayman shows how reformulations of interviewers’ questions by interviewees before responding to them, can be used to shift the topical agenda, ignore the second part of a question, agree with some proposal of the question, and so on. QUESTION TYPES IN CONTEXT A lot of research has been done on the types of questions and functions, appropriate interrogation strategies and their productivity, especially in relation to classroom discourse. Despite numerous studies on questions, there is little consensus on their definition. They can be characterized as: a semantic category, an illogical act, or to refer to verbal requests or directives, or simply as something from which you expect a
response. Quirk et al. offer three semantic classes of questions based on the type of answer required:
**1. questions requiring yes/no answers
- wh– questions which require an answer from a range of possible answers
- alternative questions which expect a reply from two or more options** presented in the question. O'Keeffe (2005) conducted a study of the forms and functions of questions in the context of radio phone-ins. This analysis links question type to presenter roles. For example, her findings show that over 60 per cent of declarative questions occur when the presenter is in a ‘management’ role. The question types are also related to the stage of the call in which they occur. Yes/no questions , for example, occur more in the development of topics (46 percent) and in the call opening stages ( percent). CREATING AND SUSTAINING PSEUDO-RELATIONSHIP (capitolo 5) INTRODUCTION We use the term pseudo-intimate because the participants do not normally know each other and if they do, it is only at the level of public person. SIMULATING INTIMACY BETWEEN STRANGERS IN MEDIA DISCOURSE According to Brown and Ford, intimacy is the horizontal line between members of a dyad, that derives from shared values, which may derive from kinship, social identity, gender, nationality. In order to reach such a level of disclosure, there must be a pseudo-trust relationship established between the presenter and the guests who are, in reality, strangers. However, in the absence of relations of kinship, this pseudo-intimacy must be based on a sense of common identity and nationality or on another familiarity built through frequent 'contacts' on daily radio. An important aspect to creating these pseudo-relationships is the development of a sense of co-presence when the show is on the air. Routine familiarity, small talk about time or daily events, and so on, serve to bridge the relational gap between foreigner and friend (e.g. American talk show "The Oprah Winfrey show"). Horton and Wohl were one of the first to write about the way the media and media performers create the illusion of an interpersonal relationship. They referred to it as a ‘para-social’ relationship because it is based on an implicit agreement between the performer and the audience that they will pretend the relationship is not mediated and is carried on as though it were face-to-face. In their study of The Johnny Carson Show , Horton and Wohl found that many viewers, in 1950s America, claimed that they ‘knew’ Johnny Carson better than their nextdoor neighbour.
adress. They quote research that shows how the address-forms : brother and comrade, emerged after the Iranian and Chinese revolutions, respectively. They conclude, saying that with regard to the use of vocatives, that “the speaker does not use the vocative to attract the attention of his recipient, but to define the interpersonal space between them”.
- Leech’s study considers vocatives formally, functionally and semantically. He identifies semantic categories based on degree of familiarity. He distinguishes three discrete functions of the vocative: summoning attention , addressee identification and establishing and maintaining social relationships. When the host presents a celebrity are two highlights : START OF THE INTERVIEW : At the opening of a show or at the point of introducing a new guest, the host simultaneously addresses the studio and non-studio audience and introduces the guest referring to them by their full name – first name (FN) and surname (SN). DURING THE INTERVIEW: As the interview develops, no vocative reciprocation normally takes place and the only other occurrence is at the closing where the FN + SN forms are again used by the presenter, so as to reinforce the public persona level of the relationship. PRAGMATIC MARKERS According to Carter and McCarthy , pragmatic markers are a functional class of elements that encode speaker intentions and interpersonal meanings. These include: discourse markers , which indicate the intentions of the speaker regarding the organization, structuring and monitoring of speech; stance markers , indicating the position or attitude of the speaker towards the message and interjections, and interjections, items which indicate affective responses and reactions to the discourse. RESPONSE TOKEN According to Carter and McCarthy, the term response token gives a better description of their function of referring to an entire sentence rather than being defined as adjectives or adverbs_._ In intimacy interactions between friends, we often find that when someone is talking, other participants add vocalizations ( mmm, umhum ) and short expressions ( yes, really ) to show that they are listening, that they are interested, that they agree ( exactly, absolutely ), who are surprised ( you’re not serious !) or shocked ( I don’t believe it !) saddened ( that sucks !), and so on. They are signals for the speaker to continue. These features are found in some types of multimedia interactions_._ O’Keeffe and Adolphs propose four main functions of response tokens in radio phone-ins:
- CONTINUE TOKENS : these maintain the flow of the discourse, with forms such as yeah, mm as the most typical exponents.
- CONVERGENCE TOKENS : These are used in points of agreement and understanding in a conversation and also include convergence around common knowledge or known information.
- ENGAGEMENT TOKENS : these are response tokens which register high on the affective scale where a listener is responding at an affective or relational level to the content of the message. They manifest in many forms (for example single-word forms such as excellent , short repetitions, echo questions).
- INFORMATION RECEIPT TOKENS : These responses are highly organizational and associated with managing interactions, which can serve as a global recognition token of the speech in which adequate information was received. DISCOURSE MARKERS Many commonly used words and phrases function as discourse markers, or example, adverbs and adjectives such as anyway , well , and right or phrases and clauses such as as I was saying , you know , you see. Discourse markers help to organize the discourse. They can also give an indication of the degrees of formality and people’s feelings towards the interaction. We can use discourse markers for: CONFIRMING INFORMATION : “oh right okay” CREATE TOPIC BOUNDARIES : “right, well..” CALL CLOSINGS : “Right okay Micheal, thank you”
