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прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - News Analysis

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following students in the respective case studies:

Racism and the Press

Jacqueline Daniéls, Irma Jetten, Wietske Piek, Leny Schuitemaker, Arghje de Sitter, Hans van Steensel, Tessa Veeren, Jeroen de Rooij, for the first case study, and Albert Assen, Sylvia Boigulan, Lieven Coppenjans, Carla Dekker, Anneke Dorrestein, Miranda Gerritsen, Eleonore Gesell, Age Niels Holstein, Aart-Jan Hoolsema, Lidwien Jansen, Diana Janssen, Arthy Lamur, Jan Lapére, Louk Lób, Fokke Minnema, Ineke Mok, Yvette Nagel, Eveline Onstein, Radj Ramcharan, Marcel Ravier, Debbie The, Marianna Toffani, Adraan de Ruig, Heleen van Galen, Pauline van Gelder, Bea van der Garde, Donan van der Kooij, Gerda van der Meer, and Henk van der Spoel, for the second case study. Special thanks for Rina Siemons, Jan Lapere and Pauline van Gelder for their computer work in this second case study of the Dutch press.

Squatters in the Dutch Press

Wine Baljet, Jacqueline Daniels, Hans Deckers, Renée Groenenwoud, Jos Herbergs, Veronique van der Heijden, Francois Laureys, Karin van Munster, Bert Pat, Elisabeth Roelvink, Ineke van der Wal, Maarten van Rooij.

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Structures of International News I (The Gemayel Case Study)

Annette van Beugen, Sylvia Blanken, Anneke Blokland, Arjan van der Boon, Eric Borsje, Annemarie van der Bosch, Monique Ettema, Ton van Golde, Eleonora Grapperhaus, Gert-Willem Hartmans, Marijke Haanraadts, Annette van den Hogen, Jaap-Jan de Jong, Kees Keijzer, Juliette Koning, Bert Kuipers, Dirk Monster, .Rob Muller, Johan Oostlander, Anneke Rómer, Jeroen de Rooij, Winnifred Rook, Koos Schwartz, Lidwien Schweitzer, Fanny Spijker, Marleen Swenne, Pauline Veenhuizen, Marlies Wessels.

Structures of International News H and III (Third World vs. First World)

Madu Augustine, Bart van der Bijl, Loes Bellaart, Inge Boer, Joost van der Brekel, Lurdes Casanova, Liesbeth Dekker, Maria-Anne van Dijk, Rick Eggink, Jeroen Fabius, Saskia Glazenburg, Peter Grondman, Aleid Horjus, Christel Jansen, Rob de Jong, Aafke Jochems, Willem Knoppe, Ronald Lagerweij, Chantal van Leeuwen, Kaj Mastenbroek, Edmond de Meijer, Anneke Renner, Fannie Spijker, Eva Stegemann, Henk Timmerman, Jeroen Visser, Paul Wamsteeker. Marjolijn Wesselo, Marlies Wessels.

The Tamil Study

Afshin Afkari, Sylvia Borg nan, Erik van der Hoeven, Diana Janssen, Marcel Ravier and Mark Waanders. For this study also the assistance of the Dutch Organization for Refugees in collecting the clippings is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

I wish to thank the following persons and institutions for their collaboration in the preparation of the Gemayel study:

Diplomatic Representatives of The Netherlands in: Ecuador, Sudan, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Niger, Zaire, Kuwait, Syria, Liberia, Ethiopia, Surinam, Sri Lanka, Zambia, Upper Volta, Zimbabwe, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Lebanon, Tanzania, Uruguay, Thailand and Guatemala.

Diplomatic Representatives in The Netherlands and Europe: Cuba, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Venezuela, Austria, Algeria, Iran (Brussels), Iraq, Morocco, South Africa, Bangladesh (Brussels), People's Republic of China, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam (Paris), Australia, New Zealand, Tonga (London), Upper Volta (Paris), and Brazil.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xv

The editora of the following newspapers: The Christian Science Monitor (U.S.), Los Angeles Times (U.S.), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times (U.S.), The Wall Street Journal (U.S.), The Gazette (Canada), Ottowa Citizen (Canada), El Diario de Hoy (El Salvador), Daily Gleaner/Sunday Gleaner (Jamaica), France-Antilles (Martinique), Barricada (Nicaragua), El Mundo (Puerto Rico), Jornal do Brasil (Brazil), O Estado de Sáo Paulo (Brazil), El Mercurio (Chile), El Tiempo (Colombia), El Dia (Uruguay), Het Laatste Nieuws (Belgium), La Libre Belgique (Belgium), Berlingske Tidende (Denmark), Information (Denmark), Politiken (Denmark), Daily Express (England), Daily Mirror (England), The Guardian (England), Morning Star (England), The Observer (England), The Sun (England), L'Humanité (France), Ta Nea (Greece), Morgunbladid (Iceland), The Irish Times (Ireland), Corriera della Sera (Italy), Il Manifesto (Italy), La Repubblica (Italy), L'Unitá (Italy), Aftenposten (Norway), Diário de Lisboa (Portugal), El Pais (Spain), La Vanguardia (Spain), Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden), Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), Frankfurter Allgemeine (West Germany), Süddeutsche Zeitung (West Germany), Zeri i Popullit (Albania), Neues Deutschland (DDR), Tribüne (DDR), Népszabadság (Hungary), Al Missa (Egypt), AlGomhouriya (Egypt), The Egyptian Gazette (Egypt), Kayhan International (Iran), Ath-Thawra (Iraq), Yedioth Ahronoth (Isra¿l), Ha'aretz (Israel), L'Orient-Le Jour (Lebanon), Le Réveil (Lebanon), Al Alam (Morocco), L'Opinion (Morocco), Daily Gulf Times, Daily Nation (Kenya), Daily Times (Nigeria), Rand Daily Mail (South Africa), The Bangladesh Observer (Bangladesh), The Daily Ittefaq (Bangladesh); Renmin Ribao (People's Republic of China), The Statesman (India), Mainichi Shimbun (Japan), New Straits Times (Malaysia), Daily News (Sri Lanka), The China Times (Taiwan), Thai Rath (Thailand), The Daily Telegraph (Australia), The Sun (Australia), The Sun News Pictorial (Australia), The New Zealand Herald (New Zealand), and La Dépéche de Tahiti (Tahiti).

The editors of the following newsagencies: AFP (The Haque), UPI (London), DPA (Hamburg), Reuters (London), IPS (Rome), AP (Amsterdam), ANP (The Hague).

Airlines: Aerolineas Argentinas, Finnair, TAP Portugese Airlines, Iberia, Aeroflot, Jugoslovenski Aerotransport, Saudi Arabian Airlines, Tunis Air, Air-India, Gatada Indonesian Airways, Japanese Airways, Korean Airlines, Philippine Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways, Quantas, and Turkish Airlines.

Libraries and Institutions: SACO, Documentation Department (Antwerp); The Public Library of the City of Amsterdam; Royal Institute of

xvi

ACKNOVYLEDGMENTS

Linguistics and Anthropology (Leiden); Library of the Dutch Royal Institute for the Tropics (Amsterdam); and Turkish Information Office (Amsterdam).

Our special thanks go to the following volunteers: Willy Groenewold, Coen Mulder, Judith Junger and Rob de Jong for scoring newspaper articles; Dr. B. C. A. Walraven (University of Leiden) for ti-a..oslating several articles from Korean newspapers; Marjolein van Voorthuisen for processing the larger part of the data into the computer; and anonymous translators who helped us translate articles from Turkish, Japanese, Greek, and a number of Slavic languages.

1

THE ANALYSIS

OF NEWS

AS DISCOURSE

NEWS AS DISCOURSE

One of the most obvious properties of media news, ignored or neglected in both traditional and more recent approaches to media reporting, is that news reports, whether in the press or on TV, constitute a particular type of discourse. The prevailing influence of the social sciences in the study of mass communication has led to a nearly exclusive focus on the economic, political, social, or psychological aspects of news processing. This orientation provided important insights into the (macro) conditions of news production and into the uses or effects of mass media reporting. The message itself in such studies tended to receive attention only as far as it could provide information about the factors of its various contexts. Traditional, as well as more recent, forms of content analysis aimed at a methodologically adequate description of selected properties of such media messages with the primary goal to be able to make contextual inferences. The adequacy of this approach resided more in the reliability of scoring categories and in the sophisticated nature of the statistical treatment of the results than in the systematic analysis and understanding of the media messages in their own right.

Against the background of current developments in the new interdisciplinary study of discourse, we are now able to take a different approach.

1

2

NEWS AS DISCOURSE

Central to this new orientation is its perspective on the very core of the process of mass communication, viz the mediated discourses themselves. No longer are these discourses merely analyzed in terms of practical, while observable and countable, intermedinty variables between properties of sources or production conditions and characteristics of media users or effects. Media discourses in general, and news reports in particular, should also be accountedfor in their own right, e.g., as particular types of language use or text and as specific kinds of sociocultural practice.

This means, first of all, that such media discourses should be analyzed in terms of their structures at various levels of description. Such a structural analysis is not limited to the grammatical description of phonological, morphological, syntactic, or semantic structures of isolated words, word groups, or sentences as it is customary in structural or generative linguistics. Discourses also have more complex, higher-level properties, such as coherence relations between sentences, overall topics, and schematic forms, as well as stylistic and rhetorical dimensions. Both as monological, printed, or spoken, text and as dialogical interaction, media discourses thus receive an integrated account of their more general as well as their more distinctive organization. In this way we are able, for instance, to describe the structures and textual functions of headlines or leads of news reports in the press, as well as the style, ordering, and thematic organization of such media stories. Similarly, news interviews or tan( shows can be analyzed in terms of turn taking, sequencing, or strategic moves in publicly communicated verbal interaction.

Yet, this is not all. The study of discourse is not limited to an explica account of structures per se. Developments in the study of discourse in such divérse disciplines as speech communication, cognitive psychology, social psychology, microsociology, and ethnography have shown that discourse is not simply an isolated textual or dialogical structure. Rather it is a complex communicative event that also embodies a social context, featuring participants (and their properties) as well as production and reception processes. Although a sound structural analysis of media discourse would already provide important contributions to the study of mass communication, it is this wider, contextual perspective on discourse that makes it particularly relevant for the study of media discourse. In this way, discourse analysis can also yield new insights finto the processes of production and uses that are justifiably found to be of paramount importance in mass communication research. New in this approach is that the many factors or constraints in production, from economic conditions to social and institutional routines of newsmaking, can now be related explicitly to various structural properties of news reports. The same is true for reception processes: Understanding, memorizaron, and reproduction of news information can now be studied as a function of both textual and contextual (cognitive, social) properties of the communication process.

1. THE ANALYSIS OF NEWS AS DISCOURSE

3

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

The application of discourse analysis in mass communication research is relatively new; therefore, a brief introduction is necessary to discuss the backgrounds and developments of this new approach (see van Dijk, 1985c, for details). At the same time, this historical sketch may show the multidisciplinary roots as well as the theoretical and methodological diversity of the field of discourse analysis.

Although the history of the new cross-discipline of discourse studies (in German "Textwissenschaft") can be traced back to ancient treatises of rhetoric and poetics of more than 2,000 years ago, its modem development dates from the mid-1960s. Parallel to, and methodologically often inspired by, the development of both structural and generative grammars in linguistics, the present study of discourse has one of its roots in anthropology and ethnography and in the relationships of these disciplines with poetics and semiotics. Against the historical background of the movement of Russian formalism that accompanied the Soviet Revolution, anthropologists, linguists, and literary scholars provided the first elementary stnictural analyses of various types of discourse (Erlich, 1965). Until now, perhaps the most influential of these analyses across many disciplinary boundaries has been the morphology of the Russian folktale proposed by Vladimir Propp 60 years ago (Propp, 1928/1958).

Structuralism, Semiotics,

Narrativo Analysis, and Ethnography

Unknown in the West for decades, Propps study and those of other early formalists inspired the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958, 1960) in the 1960s. Together with new developments in structural linguistics, his work on the analysis of myths and the first French translations of the Russian formalists (Todorov, 1966b) stimulated the growing movement that is now known as French structuralism. One major characteristic of this structuralist approach is its interest for the analysis of narrative. Both literary and everyday stories, followed by accounts of film and social myths, thus received a linguistically inspired description by such scholars as Barthes (1966), Greimas (1966), Todorov (1966a, 1969), Kristeva (1969), Eco (1966; 1976), Metz (1966), and Bremond (1964, 1973), among many others (Communications, 1964, 1966; see Culler, 1975, for an introduction). Although these initial studies started around 1964, their sociocultural context and especially their influence was not independent of the student movements and their consequent academic transformations in and alter 1968. The 1970s saw a quickly spreading influence of this type of structuralism both in Europe and in the United States, although its major

4

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

and most lasting impact can be seen in the Latin countries of Europe and the Americas.

One binding element in this vety diverse set of approaches was the rebirth of a new discipline, viz. semiotics (in French, sémiologie), from several parent disciplines in the social sciences (Morris, 1938) and the humanities (Barthes, 1964; Eco, 1976). As the general study of signs, it enabled anthropologists, literary scholars, linguists, and sociologists alike to study meaning and signifying practices in a terminology that allows crossdisciplinaty comparison and coherence. Besides the well-known study of myths, stories, and poems, it also spawned increased interest in the analysis of cultural objects or practices that hitherto had been neglected in the traditional disciplines, e.g., gestures, national flags and symbols, movies, advertisements, comics, and other media messages. (Many of these studies were first published in the well-known joumal Communications .) This semiotic approach later also influenced work in the analysis of media messages and news (Bentele, 1981; Hartley, 1982).

At the same time, on the other side of the ocean, structural anthropology had also given rise to systematic analysis of myths or folktales (Dundes, 1964; Kiingas-Maranda & Maranda, 1971). Yet, it was linguistic anthropology in the United States that provided the background for a broader study of discourse and communicative events. Initiated by people such as Hymes and Gumperz, the mid-1960s also witnessed the emergente of the ethnography of speaking or ethography of communication (Hymes, 1964; Gumperz & Hymes, 1972). Besides structural analysis of myths, tales, stotytelling, songs, and several type of evetyday discourse, this orientation examined the full ethnographic context of such discourses, including their actual performance or the social and cultural conditions of their uses (Bauman & Sherzer, 1974; Saville-Troike, 1982; Gumperz, 1982a, 1982b).

Conversation Analysis

The second major source of current discourse analysis can be found in microsociology. Against the background of various interpretative or phenomenological orientations, sociologists as diverse as Goffman (1959, 1967) Garfinkel (1967), and Cicourel (1973) focused attention on evetyday interactions and their underlying meanings and interpretations. This framework soon led to special interest in one of the most mundane yet at the same time perhaps most fascinating types of everyday interaction: talk (Sudnow, 1972; Schenkein, 1978). Under the initial impetus of the work by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) on tum taking, this conversational analysis rapidly spread to other disciplines such as sociolinguistics and ethnography and is now one of the dominant paradigms in the wider field of discourse

1. THE ANALYSIS OF NEWS AS DISCOURSE

5

analysis. Besides the continuing attention on informal talk, it also influenced or was paralleled by the analysis of other types of dialogical interaction, such as doctor—patient discourse, classroom interaction, meetings, or job interviews (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975; Labov & Fanshel, 1977; Mehan, 1979; see also van Dijk, 1985c, vol 3; Atkinson & Heritage, 1984; McLaughlin, 1984).

Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics

The third direction of research that was important for the development of discourse analysis was inspired by philosophical studies, also during the 1960s, of speech acts (such as promises or threats) by Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and Grice (1967/1975). They provided the basic conceptual framework of the pragmatic account of language use and thus enabled the construction of the necessary link between verbal utterances analyzed as linguistic objects on the one hand and the accomplishment of social action on the other hand (Sadock, 1974; Parret, Sbisa, & Verschueren, 1981; Leech, 1983; Levinson, 1983) Although much of this work was initially limited to isolated one-sentence utterances, this pragmatic missing link between linguistic structures and social action also appeared to be relevant for the analysis of discourse as a sequence of speech acts and for the relationships between text and context (van Dijk, 1981).

The fourth influence on discourse analysis was the emerging discipline of sociolinguistics in the mid 1960s (Fishman, 1968). Instead of the more abstract and context-free study of language systems in terms of structural or generative grammars, sociolinguistics proposed a more empirical study of actual language use in its social context (Giglioli, 1972; Dittmar, 1976). It focused on the impact of social factors (class, gender, ethnicity, etc.) on linguistic variation and rejected the currently prevailing assumption of a homogeneous speech community sharing the same grammar. Under the inspiring influence of people such as ErvinTripp (1969) and Labov (1972a, 1972b), this study of the actual uses of language naturally led to the analysis of stylistic variation and various types of discourse, such as parent—child discourse, everyday stories, and verbal duelling among black youths. As with the other disciplines mentioned, much contemporary sociolinguistics merges with social discourse analysis (Stubbs, 1983).

Text Processing in Psychology and Artificial Intelligence

Fifth, the late 1960s and early 1970s also produced a paracligm shift in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial Intelligence. After its too-close encounter with generative sentence grammars, psychology soon

6

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

discovered the fascinating field of text processing, with its obvious applications in educational psychology (Freedle & Carroll, 1972; Kintsch, 1974). Comprehension, storage, memory representation, and reproduction of textual information were the major processes analyzed in this fruitful research orientation (see van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983, for survey and further references). Stories were the major discourse type for which these processes were investigated, due at least in part through American transmitters inspired by the structural analysis of narrative (van Dijk, 1980b). The contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to this field also focused on stories and proved to be especially important in the computer simulation of the vast amounts of knowledge (organized in scripts) necessary for the interpretation of discourse (Schank & Abelson, 1977).

Text Linguistics

Finally, linguistics itself, pardy under the influence of work in the structural analysis of narrative, started to grow out of its self-imposed sentence boundary. Especially in Western Europe, research starting at the end of the 1960s produced first proposals for the elaboration of text grammars and text theories (Petófi, 1971; Dressler, 1972; van Dijk, 1972; Schmidt, 1973; see de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981, and Beaugrande, 1980, for introduction). These were designed to capture linguistic regularities of sentence sequences and higher level semantic interpretations in terms of macrostructures (van Dijk, 1980a). In the United Kingdom, this attention for discourse structures has been characteristic of many linguistic studies inspired by socalled systemic grammar, developed by Halliday (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Benson & Greaves, 1985). It was found in this textlinguistic work that not only the interesting linguistic properties of sequences and whole text fragmenta, but also the very phonological and syntactic structures, as well as the semantic interpretations of sentences, depend on their position and ftmction in discourse. Similar observations were made in the discourse grammars developed in the United States (Givón, 1979). These different forms of linguistic discourse analysis also allowed for the first time the specification of explicit relationships between grammatical structures of a text on the one hand and other discourse structures, e.g., narrative structures, on the other.

Integration of Discourse Analysis as New Cross-discipline

In the early 1970s, these various orientations of discourse analysis all resulted in monographs, special journal issues, conferences, and other institutional models. In the beginning, however, these developments were still relatively independent. Not until the end of the 1970s, did increasing cross-