News Discourse And Digital Currents

In recent years, journalistic practices have undergone a radical change due to the increasing pressure of new digital media on the professional practice. The ever-growing development of new technologies and the ceaseless fluctuation of social practices have challenged some of the traditional genres found in these professional contexts. On the basis of these premises, this book investigates a particular genre found in the context of TV newscasts. The genre under investigation is that of news tickers (or crawlers), that is, the graphic elements that scroll at the bottom of the screen during newscasts. The book introduces readers to this under-researched genre through a year-long collection of the news tickers displayed on BBC World News. Thanks to a corpus-based genre analysis, the generic status of news tickers is better defined by highlighting the presence of given strategies of marketization. Additionally, this volume investigates if news tickers can be seen as a mixed (sub-)genre that interdiscursively combines traditional linguistic elements of headlines and lead paragraphs to achieve, from a (Critical) Genre Analysis point of view, a specific private intention in the context of the BBC.

Rena Bivens takes the reader inside TV newsrooms to explore how news organisations are responding to the paradigmatic shifts in media and communication practices.

This volume provides descriptions and interpretations of social and cognitive phenomena as well as processes that emerge at the interface of languages and cultures in the context of contrastive and contact linguistics and media discourse. Different contexts are explored with rich empirical findings and authentic exemplifying materials. The book includes fifteen papers, divided into three parts. Part 1 addresses conceptual reflection on languages and cultures in contact and contrast, while Part 2 focuses on contact linguistics and borrowing. Part 3 discusses cultural and linguistic aspects of media discourses.

This collection explores the changing nature of health discourse in different digital environments. It offers sustained discourse analyses of a number of interactions generated through the affordances and constraints of these new social contexts, which are affecting health communication in subtle and profound ways.

This book presents a thorough quantitative and qualitative, corpus-assisted investigation of the language employed in a specialized communicative activity type: namely, the political interview aired on British and American Sunday morning talk shows. More specifically, interviewers’ and interviewees’ turns are analyzed here so as to unveil the stratification of discourses characterizing their speech, which inevitably favours the proliferation of a mixture of different lexico-grammatical traits and pragmatic functions. Previous studies in this field mainly adopt a conversation analysis approach, thus focusing on turn allocation and organization. This book adds a different perspective by resorting to a combination of corpus-driven and corpus-based techniques in the study of a specifically designed corpus of contemporary TV political interviews, the result being a comprehensive investigation of the genre. The analysis tackles both specialized language aspects and variation between spoken and written English in the genre at stake. Throughout the study, linguistic forms are associated, when relevant, with their pragmatic functions in context, bringing to the fore, for example, differences between the ways in which interviewers and interviewees interact with each other and with the audience. Particular emphasis is also placed on salient distinguishing traits characterizing American and British interviews.

Inclusivity and Belonging in Chinese Discourse explores how recent language change in the third-person pronoun system of Mandarin Chinese is harnessed by netizens to construct spaces of (non-)belonging along a fluid continuum in the context of pro- and anti-LGBTQ discourses. Grounded in stance, framing, and positioning theories, the monograph contributes to the notions of membership categorization and (co-)reference chains for identity construction. With a focus on newly emergent genderless third-person pronoun ta, written in pinyin, and the various noun and verb phrases which co-occur with the pronoun in specific contexts, this monograph shows how ta has become a conventionalized language practice accepted and implemented by language users of various identities, sexual orientations, and backgrounds for a vast array of interactional and communicative purposes. The monograph illustrates how ta is used in doing identity construction work for the self, another party involved in the interaction, and/or a third party external to the interaction, often simultaneously. That is, the specific function and referent of ta is defined through language users’ unique interpretations and the discourse community of use, resulting in a ‘chameleon-like’ pragmatically loaded pronoun which reflects the inherent fluidity of identity(ies). This monograph will appeal to scholars, language researchers, and advanced graduate students concerned with inclusive language use in the Chinese context, particularly within discourse analysis, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and semantics. The book will also be valuable to professionals concerned with inclusive language and identity construction.

Expressions of hate are words or actions that are discriminatory, hostile, or violent to a person or group for racial, sexual, ideological, ethnic, or identity reasons. Such expressions contribute to an environment of prejudice and intolerance towards those who are targeted. The spread of hate speech has been exacerbated by the growth of social media networks, and dissemination strategies (e.g., astroturfing) are becoming increasingly complex. Although there has been an exponential increase in the study of hate speech in recent years, most methods have focused on the English language, limiting research of the phenomenon in other languages such as Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. It is crucial to understand the role played by digital media and journalism in the dissemination, detection, and control of hate speech from current digital scenarios. News Media and Hate Speech Promotion in Mediterranean Countries provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings about hate speech studies including into prejudice and intolerance. Covering topics such as detecting hate speech, linguistic challenges, and the taxonomy of hate speech, this book is ideal for political decision makers, third-sector representatives, journalists, digital media professionals, and researchers.

Languages, diversity and power: these are the concepts running through all chapters in this volume. Rooted in linguistics, translation studies and literary studies, often informed by cultural and political studies, postcolonial theory and history, the contributions here tackle the thorny issue of power relations as expressed, enforced, dismissed through the use of language(s). From the British press, to power relations as represented in TV series set in courtrooms, and from language-power intersections in the translation of Italian post-war cinema to power enforcement through film-making in Africa, the volume spans decades and continents, providing in-depth analyses of a host of contexts, facts, actions. As such, it will be of particular interest to scholars and students in linguistics, translation and cultural studies.