Swearing fulfils a range of interpersonal pragmatic functions and also acts as a distinguishing feature of speakers and contexts. In broadcast media, swearing has traditionally been censored or at ...least limited in its deployment; although when used, it serves characterization, interactional, and narrative functions. In this article, we consider the Disney+ television series Only Murders in the Building (OMITB, 2021–), in which swearing is not subject to standard media constraints, due to its provision on a streaming service. Freed from such constraints, OMITB is distinctive in its unusually high frequency and dispersion of swearing across characters and contexts. Compared with both real-life and media-based analyses of language use, the swearing in OMITB reflects neither real-life nor standard broadcast patterns. In this paper, we investigate how swearing is used by the characters, and what it is ‘doing’ in the series. In particular, we highlight the role of swearing in affiliation and relationship-building, both between characters in the story world, and between the series and its viewers. Our analysis contributes to understanding the pragmatic functions of media swearing.
Now reissued and retypeset, this canonical book explores the role of language and images in newspaper, radio, online and television news. The authors introduce useful frameworks for analysing ...language, image and the interaction between the two, and illustrate these with authentic news stories from around the English-speaking world, ranging from the Oktoberfest to environmental disasters to the killing of Osama bin Laden. This analysis persuasively illustrates how events are retold in the news and made ‘newsworthy' through both language and image. This clearly written and accessible introduction to news discourse is essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers in linguistics, media and journalism studies and semiotics.
Community notifications are released by law enforcement to warn the public of a high-risk offender re-entering the community. Unfortunately, negative media attention generated from community ...notifications can impact an individual's ability to successfully reintegrate, leading to increased recidivism. This study examines whether modifications to community notifications can change public perceptions of offenders. Participants were presented with community notifications including jargon or simple language, an explanation of release or no explanation, and various sentence lengths served by the justice-involved individual. Notable results included a higher tolerance for justice-involved individuals when legal jargon was used in the explanation of release. Moreover, justice-involved people were perceived to be more likeable when information on sentence length was not provided. These findings contribute to a greater understanding of factors that affect public perceptions of justice-involved individuals. Addressing these factors could decrease recidivism rates by adequately informing the public of risks without negatively impacting offender reintegration.
The utilization of social media is not limited to get entertained but it is now used to support the online learning process. Instagram, one of the social media applications, provides its users with ...verified accounts that are authentic and notable. This allows English learners to get the supporting materials to study reading and listening. Moreover, the features in Instagram are suitable to present the students with authentic materials in English from natives. This study aims to find out whether using materials taken from Instagram verified accounts enhance students’ skills in reading and listening to English. Social Media Language Learning (SMLL) is used as the approach to teaching the students several skills they might need for the international test. An experimental study method is applied while the data collection uses both quantitative and qualitative methods. Pretest and posttest are administered to perceive the students’ academic progress whereas interviews are organized to collect certain students’ opinions about this study. The participants of this study are 30 vocational learners in the fourth semester major in Graphic Design (Multimedia Concentration) at Polimedia PSDKU Medan. Following the evaluation of the students’ scores after each assessment and interviews after the training; the results reveal students’ improvement academically. As the findings indicate that social media language learning by using Instagram verified account enhances students’ ability in reading and listening and adequately supports creative and efficient learning.
This article discusses the online edition of the “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” (DAZ, German General Newspaper), an exceptional media product in Kazakhstan. This medium was chosen mainly for its very ...complex linguistic and cultural configuration. The linguistic forms are German, while the discourse and text traditions suggest a Russian influence due to the long hegemony of Russian as the language of culture and education in Kazakhstan. Additionally, the current sociocultural frame of reference is of genuine Kazakh origin.The central aim of this evidence-based media linguistic analysis was to describe the unique features in the language of this online medium, i.e. the multilingual aspects of language variation and aspects related to language and cultural contact.The methodology is based on a linguistic concept of saliency and used interrater reliability in the linguistic assessment. The study showed that the online version and the print version differ not only on a technical level, but also in their journalistic and linguistic design. The digital version is marked by livelier, more idiomatic, and more colorful texts than the print version. These differences can likely not just be attributed to the greater range of options provided by the new medium, but possibly also to the larger share of contributions by authors from Germany in the online version compared to the print version. In the written practices examined in this article it could be shown that authors from Kazakhstan generally used ‘multiliteracy’ form that also generated emergent forms.
Urban Identity Through the Prism of Media Framing Kushneruk, Svetlana L.; Kurochkina, Maria A.
Vestnik Rossijskogo universiteta družby narodov. Seriâ: Teoriâ âzyka, semiotika, semantika (Online),
12/2022, Letnik:
13, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Urban identity is a complex phenomenon encompassing a wide range of city life aspects, which vary across cultures. In the media discourse, the urban issues are made prominent due to framing. The goal ...of the authors is to identify and systematize frames that generate meanings about the urban life, and explain them from the point of view of the journalistic strategies. The author focuses on exploring how topical urban issues are framed and presented to the reading audience. To gain a deeper understanding of the communicative schemata that determine interpretations of the city issues, a cognitive-discursive perspective is claimed central to the research. It proves adequate in demonstrating the synergies of two employed methods: discourse analysis and frame analysis. Applying a case-study approach, a sample of 658 texts is analyzed. 2577 contexts have been retrieved from The Nottingham Post between 2014 and 2017. The results show that the urban life representations rest on frame structures of different conceptual complexity. Urban identity is a rich conceptual structure (a macroframe), constituted by four frames, observable in the discourse-world of the city. Each of them has foci, which draw public attention to the social aspects of the urban living. Positive presentation of the authorities has been revealed as the leading macrostrategy aimed at supporting and approving of the initiatives taken by the local administration, which is realized through the strategies of reference, predication, and argumentation. The findings add to the framing analysis and could be beneficial for the development of urban policies.
The early 1990s saw the proposal for ‘people first’ language: premodified nouns (
disabled people) were to be replaced by postmodified nouns (
people with disabilities). This usage was widely adopted ...in the fields of education and psychology. This article examines the distribution of both patterns in the electronic archives of the
Houston Chronicle from 2002 to 2007, well after the suggestion for postmodification euphemism was launched, to investigate how widely the pattern has been adopted in everyday language use. The data from the
Houston Chronicle are compared to the usage patterns in
Google News
(
http://news.google.com/).
Contrary to the usage in contemporary educational and psychological literature, the
Houston Chronicle seems to favor the ‘non-PC’ usage: over 70% of the phrases resort to premodification. The distribution of ‘non-PC’ vs. ‘PC’ phrases, however, is not random: premodification refers to ‘undesirable’ societal elements (e.g., prisoners) or, for instance, to fictional characters in movie descriptions; by contrast, postmodification is reserved for children or non-criminal adults. The juxtaposition of these patterns in contemporary newspaper articles, and their deliberate separation in terms of the semantics of the referent (premodification for ‘undesirable’ or fictional referents; postmodification for ‘vulnerable’ referents) is likely to block the broader adoption of the ‘PC’ syntactic pattern and will ultimately fuel a desire for further euphemisms dependent on lexical innovations. The same patterns appear in
Google News; however, lexically ‘non-PC’ usage, together with metalinguistic discussions of how to refer to the target group are much more prevalent in
Google News than in the
Houston Chronicle.
In September 2016, the Walt Disney Company launched a series of packs of stickers featuring characters and art from Disney stories. Stickers are – along with emoji, GIFs, videos and images – ...graphical devices or “graphicons” (Herring and Dainas 2017, 2185) used to communicate on social media platforms. In details, stickers are elaborate character-driven emoticons, that feature the illustration of one or more characters and are visually realized as a mix of cartoons and comics-like representation of emotions and/or of actions. Since their first appearance in Asian countries in the early 2010s, stickers have become a new tool that can be used, like emoji, to make communication easier and faster on mobiles; but they have become also a lucrative business as they may be customized for brands or products and thus turned into a sort of collectibles. Disney stickers were launched by a virtual campaign named As Told by Emoji, that retells Disney stories through custom designed emoji. Indeed, the campaign is composed of a series of short, animated videos that “reimagine both classic and contemporary Disney films through the language of the contemporary digital age, with all the associated playfulness and humor” (Grobar 2017). The present essay will analyze the features of Disney stickers as a resource to make meaning in digital language adopting a socio-semiotic multimodal approach integrated with mediated discourse analysis. More in details, it will focus both on the examination of the “modal affordances” (Kress 1993) of Disney digital stickers – that is on “what it is possible to express and represent readily, easily with a mode, given its materiality and given the cultural and social history of that mode” (Jewitt and Kress 2003, 14) – and on the semantic components added to stickers by the ‘translation’ of Disney stories into digital language in the As Told by Emoji campaign.
