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

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1. THE ANALYSIS OF NEW AS DISCOURSE

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fertilization and integration take place among several of these subfields. What first started as a more or less autonomous development in various disciplines, increasingly appeared as different orientations of a newly emerging discipline, variously called discourse analysis, discourse studies, or textlinguistics (see van Dijk, 1985c). This new cross-discipline now has two international special journals, Text and Discourse Processes, and reg-ularly appears as a special section in many of the conferences in the different disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. Besides the original founding disciplines, others, such as the studies of history and law (both basically concerned with texts of all kinds) and finally speech communication and mass communication, soon joined this new field of research.

This presentation of the emergence of discourse analysis as a discipline consisting of different fields, largely defined by their original parent disciplines, provides only a partial picture of ongoing research. More work may be occurring on speech acts in linguistics than in the original discipline, namely, philosophy, where the theory of speech acts was first developed. Similarly, the debate on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical usefulness of so-called story grammars has been fiercer, more extensive, and even more fruitful in psychology and Al than in literary scholarship, semiotics or anthropology together, the originators of the notion of a story grammar. In other words, the new discipline can also be viewed in terms of its problems or phenomena of research, and these will often cross original disciplinary boundaries.

Similarly, there are also differences among what might vaguely be termed types of discourse analysis in various countries. That is, style of theory formation, analysis, and writing, together with philosophical and even political differences, distinguish, for instance, much Anglo-Saxon discourse analysis from current French and Latin discourse analysis, although there are increasing crossovers, overlaps, translations, and hence mutual influences. Broadly speaking, Anglo-Saxon discourse analysis combines continuing influences from structural or generative linguistics, cognitivé psychology, pragmatics, and microsociology. Unlike their own structuralist predecessors of the 1960s and early 1970s, some currently influential French schools (influenced by Althusser, Foucault, Derrida and/or Lacan) have a more philosophical style of discourse analysis, with frequent references to ideological, historical, psychoanalytical and neoMarxist work and applications especially in the field of literary studies (Culler, 1980). The writing style of some of these orientations is also more metaphorical and, therefore, sometimes difficult for the noninitiated.

This French discourse analysis, because of its historical and political background, also inspired the well-known cultural and ideological analyses of sociologists and media scholars in Britain, e.g., those of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham (Hall, Hobson,

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DISCOURSE STRUCTURES AND NEWS REPORTS

Lowe, & Willis, 1980). For application in the analysis of news, see Hardey (1982).

This broad distinction among different styles of research is merely a rough one. For instance, within the more Anglo-Saxon style, a distinction should be made between those researchers who work within a strict conversational analytic .framework and other discourse analysts. The first group rather closely follows the original microsociological methods derived from phenomenological sociology; and the latter more freely borrow from both conversational analysis, linguistics, psychology, and the social sciences. Since news in the press especially is a form of written or otherwise fixed and planned discourse, we shall focus on theories that account for the structures of written texts. Within that perspective, however, we mention work from different approaches and styles when they deal with the same phenomena or problems.

DISCOURSE STRUCTURES AND NEWS REPORTS

In our case studies of national and intemational news in the press, we make use of a series of theoretical notions from discourse analysis that need introduction. We suggested aboye that the analysis of text and dialogues, both within and outside of discourse analysis, varíes relative to different theories, methods, schools, or even individual scholars. In this respect, discourse analysis is hardly different from most other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Still, without aiming at a consensus or common denominator, this introduction mentions some of the basic theoretical and analytical notions that have been effective as well as widely shared. Some of these notions, and the unifying framework that forms the background of this introduction, have been developed in our own work on discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1972, 1977, 1980a, 1981).

Discourse as Communicative Event

We have mentioned earlier that discourse, in a wider sense, is a complex unit of linguistic form, meaning, and action that might best be captured under the notion of a communicative event or communicative act. The advantage of such a conception is that discourse, unlike more intuitive and linguistic approaches, is not limited to the actual verbal utterance, that is, to the text or dialogue itself. Especially for the analysis of talk, it is obvious that the speaker and the hearer, their personal and social properties, and other

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aspects of the social situation belong to this event. In this sense, a conversation, a meeting, a courtroom session of a trial, or a classroom lesson are all examples of such complex communicative events. These might further be analyzed finto smaller communicative acts, such as a stmy in a conversation, a plea by a defense attorney in a trial, or an explanation of a subject by a teacher in class. And some of these, for example, stories or argumentations, may exhiba properties similar to communicative acts or discourse types of other social settings.

For written or printed discourse types, this interactional nature of discourse appears less obvious: The writer, the text, and the reader are less closely participating in one spatiotemporally identifiable situation. Yet, even in this case, it may be appropriate to account for texts in the more dynamic terminology of discourse use in production, understanding, and action. For instance, the very important account of discourse meaning may up to a point contain an abstracted description of the meaning of the text itself, but empirically it is more accurate to speak of meanings expressed by or produced with the utterance, or publication of a text by a writer, or of meanings that are assigned to or inferred from a text by a reader. In that case, shared meanings, knowledge of the language, knowledge of the world, and other beliefs must be taken finto account in such a charactorization of discourse meaning. In addition, writers produce forms and meanings that are presumed to be understood to the readers, or tha. t may explicitly address the readers, provoke reactions, and generally be recipient designed like conversations. In written communication, writers and readers are engaged in a form of sociocultural practice.

These characteristics are also true for news discourse. In a narrow sense, we may give an abstract analysis of the structures of news reports as a specific type of public discourse. Yet, at the same time, as we shall see in more detail later, such structures of news reports can be understood adequately only if we also analyze them as the result of cognitive and social processes of discourse and meaning production by journalists, or as related to the interpretation processes and media uses by newspaper readers or TV viewers.

For analytical reasons, however, it may be useful to distinguish between cognitive processing or social practices of textual communication and the structures of media texts themselves. In our study, we focus on the textual structures of news reports and only occasionally relate them with their cognitive, social, or political contexts, which have received most attention in other work on news and the news media (Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1978; Fishman, 1980). For further theoretical analysis of news structures and cognitive processing in news production and understanding, we refer to van Dijk (1987e).

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DISCOURSE STRUCTURES AND NEWS REPORTS

Grammatical Analysis

Within a structural perspective, the abstract nature of the analysis allows us to make distinctions among different levels or dimensions of discourse. In real production and comprehension by language users, such levels may be processed more or less at the same time or used strategically in different ways to draw as much information from each leve'. as possible. Part of these abstract levels of discourse are traditionally described by linguistic grammars, that is, systems of rules and categories for the abstract analysis of sounds, word and sentence forms, and their meanings. In this way, we obtain respectively a phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic description of sentences. In discourse grammars, accounting for sequences of sentences, such descriptions are relative: Properties of the sentence form (e.g., word order) or of sentence meaning may depend on properties of other sentences in a discourse. For instance, the use of a pronoun like she is often appropriate only if it refers to a female who has been referred to earlier in the text, for example, by a phrase like my girlfriend oran actress, or who is lmown or identifiable to the hearer on the basis of other information. It is the task of linguists to specify such structures in explicit detail and especially to provide a theoretical description and explanation of the possible grammatical structures of a speciflc natural language.

When we analyze specific discourse types such as news reports, our goal is focused not merely on the possible but on the preferred or the typical grammatical structures that characterize language use in such a form of discourse. This means that we implicitly compare them to language use in other types of discourse or context, which again presupposes the possible variation of grammatical structures in different contexts. It is this variation that is the province of stylistics, a discipline that not only describes possible variations for different discourse types, but which in particular aims to account for the relationship between such variations and the personal and social contexts of language use. Thus, in formal situations and in written language, we tend to use formal words and more complex, more complete, and more grammatically correct sentences than in informal conversations. Similarly, social factors like gender, status, power, or ethnicity will also influence stylistic variation (Sebeok, 1960; Sandell, 1977; Scherer & Giles, 1979).

Especially for the quality press, this is also true for news reports, which tend to have long, complex sentences; many nominalizations, such as dis- ruption instead of they disrupted ... ; and formal jargon borrowed mostly from politicians. Sometimes, news reports exhibit syntactic structures that are rare in other discourse forms, such as the inverted declarative sentence structure: Instead of saying, "Reliable sources declared that Libya has been attacked by the US Air Force", it may state "Libya has been attacked by the

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US Air Force, reliable sources declared." Later, we shall see that this fronting of important information is a general structural property of news reports in the press, a property which we summarize under the general label of relevance structuring.

Grammatical analysis of language use in the press may also reveal the perspective of the joumalist or newspaper. Sentence syntax expresses the semantic roles of participants in an event by word order, relational functions (subject, object), or the use of active or passive forms. A headline like "Pollee kills demonstrator" puts police in first, subject position and expresses that the police has agent role. In the passive sentence "Demonstrator killed by police", the police is also agent, but in this case, the phrase referring to the demonstrator is in first, subject position, which means that police is assigned a less prominent role. Finally, the headline "Demonstrator killed" may make the role of the police implica. At the same time, the headline becomes syntactically ambiguous: It could also be read as a description of an event in which the demonstrator was the killer or more generally associate demonstrators with killing. Grammatical research on newspaper syntax has shown that this is indeed the case: Negative roles of the elite tend to be dissimulated by this kind of syntactic downgrading and implicitness (Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew, 1979).

Similarly, perspective in television news may also be expressed by camara shots in news film, which may be taken from the point of view of the police from its opponents such as demonstrators, strikers, or squatters. In the studies of the Glasgow University Media Group (1976, 1980, 1982), attention is also given to the implied perspective and evaluation in the use of words such as "strike" or "disturbance" (see Halloran, Elliott, & Murdock, 1970, for an influential study of a demonstration and the uses of words designating demonstrators).

Discourse as Coherent Sequence of Sentences

Discourse, and hence news reports, do not consist of isolated sentences, however. Beyond traditional sentence grammars and linguistics, other important discourse structures have been postulated. A first and obvious step in such an analysis is to study the structures of sequences of sentences. This means, among other things, that the syntax or semantics of a sentence in discourse is described in terms of the sentential structures and interpretations of surrounding, usually preceding, sentences in the same text. The order and functions of words, or their underlying semantic roles, may depend on such a discourse environment (Givón, 1979). If a sequence is primarily about the activities of demonstrators, for instance, it is more adequate to put "demonstrators" in first, subject position, inclicating topic role, and continue with a passive sentence like "They were harassed by the

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police", rather than with "The police harassed them." In other words, the ideologically-based point of view is expressed not only by sentence structures but also by a textual dependence of syntax and semantics. Similarly, once we have introduced a discourse participant, the rest of the text may further refer to such a participant with a pronoun ("they"), with demonstratives ("those people"), or with a full, repeated or new description ("the demonstrators", or "the hooligans"). There and other surface structures that may be used to signal underlying semantic coherence are usually described as properties of cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). There are rules and strategies for the establishment of cohesion, and it is important to find out whether news reports in general, or specific types of news topics, display special preferentes in the application of or deviation from such rules.

At the semantic level, the analysis of discourse as a sequence of sentences provides an account of relative interpretations: The meaning or reference of words, clauses, or sentences is studied as a function of those assigned to previous sentences. This aspect of discourse is often described in terms of local or sequential coherence (van Dijk, 1977). A simplified basic rule of coherence is that sentence A is coherent with sentence B, if A refers to a situation or an event that is a possible (probable, necessary) condition of the situation or event referred to by B (or vice-versa). Thus, the sequence "We went to the beach yesterday. We did a lot of surfing" is coherent according to that rule (going to the beach enables you to do surfing), whereas the sequence "We went to the beach yesterday. The price of the dollar dropped by 10% last year" is not coherent, since our visit to the beach is not the kind of event that influences the exchange rate of the dollar. Therefore, we may rephrase this coherence rule in even simpler terms: A text is coherent if it describes a possible sequence of events (acts, situations). Hence, coherence depends on our knowledge and beliefs about what is possible in the world.

The Role of Knowledge in Interpretation

This information coherence rule also shows that discourse semantics is not autonomous in the sense that we only have to know the lexical meanings of words and their combinations. We also need knowledge of the world and, hence, a cognitive and social analysis of what people in a given culture know, and how they use such knowledge in the interpretation of discourse in general and the establishment of coherence in particular. It was the recognition of this important fact that stimulated the important role of cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence in the account of discourse interpretation. In this research, the analysis of the organization and the application of knowledge and beliefs in memory became just as important as the description of the role of discourse structures during comprehension processes. It

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was shown that such knowledge must be efficiently organized in special clusters, so-called scripts, which contain all we know in our culture about a specific stereotypical type of episode. People may share scripts about shopping in the supermarket, having a birthday party, or demonstrating (Schank & Abelson, 1977). As with any other discourse type, the media rely heavily on such socially shared knowledge and beliefs in the coherent and comprehensible account of special events that require knowledge or beliefs organized in scripts, for example about civil war, terrorist attack, political meeting, voting, or 'revolution'.

Since many political scripts also involve group-based evaluative beliefs or opinions, they may also qualify as social attitudes. It follows that our subjective understanding of the coherence of a news report may depend on whether or not we share a particular knowledge script or sociopolitical attitude (Carbonen, 1979). This may be especially relevant in the understanding and evaluation of causes of events or reasons for action. With this kind of conceptual instrument, we are better equipped to study ideologi- cally-based differences in the relevant application of scripts or attitudes in news reporting when, for instance, reasons are given for the invasion of Grenada by U.S. troops, as compared to their nonintervention in other countries in the Americas, such as Chile or Paraguay. .

Macrostructures

The next step in the analysis of discourse operates at higher or more global levels than the microlevel of words, sentences, and sentence connections. If we say that a news report is about the U.S. attack on Libya, we do not merely refer to individual sentences or a sequence of sentences but to the report as a whole. This means that intuitive terms such as "is about" or "the topic (or theme) is" must be accounted for at this overall, global level. The theoretical terco semantic macrostructure was introduced to capture that important aspect of discourse and discourse processing: It makes explicit the overall topics or themes of a text and at the same time defines what we could call the overall coherence of a text as well as its upshot or gist (van Dijk, 1980a). Apparently, many words in English render more or less this same notion of most important information, and this suggests that language users frequently rely on such macrostructural information. Macrostructures are derived from sentence meanings (propositions) of a text by a set of roles in an abstract, e.g., linguistic, theoly, by operations such as selection, generalization, and construction. In a cognitive theory of discourse processing, these mies operate as tentative but effective macrostrategies that enable readers to derive the topic from a sequence of sentences (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). These operations also depend heavily on our knowledge of

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the world (scripts). They allow us to subsume proposition sequences like "U.S. planes flew to Libya. They bombed the harbor of Benghazi . ." imder a macroproposition ór topic like "The U.S. attacked Libya" because we know that militaiy attacks may involve planes, that planes usually can fly and throw bombs, and that throwing bombs is a way of attacking. Through our shared script of a military air attack, we are able to comprehend newspaper reports about such an attack and to assign them global coherence and a global topic or theme.

Macrostructures and the cognitive operations in which they are used are crucial in news production processes by reporters and editors and for comprehension, storage, memorization, and later reproduction by media users. They explain how newsmakers continuously and routinely summarize the myriad of source texts (other media messages, wires, interviews, reports, or press conferences) that are used in the production of a specific news report. Without a theory of macrostructures we would be unable to account for the special properties of headlines and leads, which subjectively summarize the rest of the news report (van Dijk, 1985d). And finally, macrostructures explain why most readers usually only remember the main topes, that is, the higher levels of the macrostructure of a news report (Hóijer & Findahl, 1984; van Dijk, 1987e).

Superstructures, News Schemata

In the same way that we need a syntactic form to express and organize the meanings of a sentence, we also need form to organize the overall meaning or macrostructure of a text as a whole. The schematic superstructure fulfills that need. Such a schema can be defined by a set of characteristic categories and by a set of rules or strategies that specify the ordering of these categories. Thus, people in our culture share a narrative schema—featuring categories such as Summaiy, Setting, Orientation, Complication, Resolution, Evaluation and Coda—which may be used even for simple, everyday storytelling (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972c, 1982). If one of the obligatory categories is lacking, people can conclude that the story is not finished, has no point, or simply is no story at all. Many routinely used discourse types also exhibit their own characteristic superstructure because it facilitates production and comprehension processes. If we know or guess that an oncoming text is story, we may activate our conventional knowledge about story schemata in our culture. This will facilitate the assignment of the specific narrative functions to the respective episodes of the text ("this must be the Complication"). Without macrostructures and superstructures, we would have to interpret and establish coherence only at the microlevel and construe ad hoc higher level structures. Experimental research has shown

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that this is very difficult if not impossible for language users. Hence, global structures, both those of thematic content as well as those of schematic form, are crucial for theoretical analysis and for the actual production and understanding of a text.

News reports, which each day are produced by the thousands and under heavy constraints of professional routines, available personnel, time, and deadlines, must also be organized by such a schema, viz. a news schema (van Dijk, 1986). That is, parts of the news text may have conventional functions that are used as obligatory or optional categories for its formal organization. Well known for instance is the Summary category composed of Headlines and Lead, respectively. The body of the text also exhibits such different schematic functions, such as Main Events, Backgrounds, Context, History, Verbal Reactions, or Comments, each of which may be further analyzed into smaller categories. For example, the Comments category may be composed of Evaluation and Expectations in which the reporter or editor may evaluate the news events. Journalists also routinely, though implicitly, search for information that may fit into such categories, as for instance when they are looking for backgrounds of the actual events. In other words, news structures such as formal conventional schemata may be related to, or even have developed from, contextual routines of news production.

An interesting feature of news reports is that both macrostructures (topics) as well as the news schema that organizes them do nót appear in the text in a continuous fashion. Rather, they tend to appear in an installment-type, discontinuous way. The top of the macrostructure of a news report generally tends to be expressed first; that is, first the headline (the highest macroproposition), then the Lead (the top of the mácrostructure), and subsequently the lower macropropositions of the report, with details of content and the less prominent schematic categories (e.g., History or Comments) towards the end. Of course, this is merely an effective strategy, which allows stylistic variation by each reporter or newspaper. For the reader it means that in principie the beginning of the text always contains the most important information. Again, we witness a significant link between news text structures and the strategies of news production and the uses of news reports in mass communication contexts. This is particularly obvious in news reports in the press but more generally also holds for television news programs, which usually only express the higher level macrostructures of a news story. Indeed, TV news may be seen as a summary or abstract of the news reports that appear in the press.

Since macrostructures are derived for or from a text on the basis of our knowledge and beliefs, they may of course be intersubjective: The most important information of a news event for one person or group may not be so for another. This also means that the thematic or schematic organization of a news report may well be biased, for instance when a relatively unimpor-

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tant piece of information is expressed in the headlines or lead or when important information is placed at the end or omitted altogether.

Relevance Structuring

The special production and reception conditions of news reports as well as their major communicative functions seem to determine their structures at all levels. The general principie is that important information must come first. This may affect not only the overall thematic or schematic organization of the news report but also the ordering of the sentences in paragraphs describing an episode and the ordering within the sentences themselves (where important news actors will tend to occupy first positions). That is, throughout the news report, and at all levels, we may study this special dimension of relevance structuring. At the same time, an analysis of produced relevance distribution in news reports also enables us to study the cognitive, social, and ideological production conditions of such reports, as well as their processing, and hence their memorization and uses by readers.

Rhetorical Structures

Finally, the rhetorical dimension may affect all structural levels of a text. Whereas relevance structuring expresses or signals what is most important, various special operations at each level are used to make the text more persuasive. Well known are phonological operations such as rhyme or assonance, syntactic operations such as parallelisms, and semantic operations such as comparisons or metaphors. Similarly, news reports may use words that function as hyperboles (overstatements, exaggerations) or understatements, or word and sentence meanings that establish contrast or build a climax. These structures further contribute to a tighter organization of news information and thus may lead to better memorization by the reader and hence to enhanced persuasion. They may also activate particular scripts or attitudes, for instante when a demonstration is rhetorically framed in tercos of violence by the use of comparisons or metaphors borrowed from military scripts (attack, defense, etc.). Similarly, news reports excessively use numbers (whether correct or not) to signal rhetorically their exactness and hence their objectivity (Roeh, 1982).

Summary and Conclusion

We have now briefly discussed the major structural levels of written discourse and applied a few central theoretical terms to establish a simplified