Appunti lezioni di Discourse Strategies in Contemporary English, prof. Demata

RISK AND CLIMATE CHANGE

The role and meaning of risk in society and discourse

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Risk are “threats to outcomes that we value” risk = what we are afraid of. Risks are

constructed within discourses.

Communication of risk is essential in free societies. It is inherently related to meaning,

perception and evaluation.

One test of a society may be how it ensures that its weakest members receive needed

information on risk.

Yet, the communication of risk is far from being stable and unproblematic.

Even the same fact may generate completely different evaluations.

The definition of risk is often contested

Car mortality, premature birth: risks

Environmental sustainability, climate change: contested discourses

What happens when we have contested discourses:

1. Difficulties in the communication of risk regarding certain discourses: from experts

to lay decision makers and from experts to lay people

2. Social institutions and conventions influence risk decisions

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Discourse Strategies in Contemporary English – M. DEMATA 2018-2019

Risk decisions are mediated by news agencies and media, which continually redefine the

meaning assigned to risks.

Van Dijk: people rely heavily on news accounts and on their (limited) repertoires for their

knowledge, beliefs and opinions, which in turn form socially shared knowledge and limited

interpretative repertoires.

The hidden power of media discourse and the capacity of power holders to exercise this

power depend on systematic tendencies in news reporting and other media activities. A

single text on its own is quite insignificant: the effects of media power are cumulative,

working through the repetition of particular ways of handling causality and agency,

particular ways of positioning the reader and so forth.

Meditation is a chain (Fairclough), through which the networking of different social

practices constrains and transforms language events in their transit across domains or

fields of social life.

Through these chains, information is transformed and recontextualized and its evaluation

may be affected. 

Example: CNN 2030 Climate Change VIDEO mediation of CNN of the report of UN

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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Science > UN report > CNN > us chain

We can understand the CNN’s position from the picture, from the title.

Spoken, Written and Multimodal Discourse

McLuhan: the medium is the message

Ong: orality vs writing

Bakhtin: the utterance

The single utterance can never be regarded as a completely free combination of forms of

language because it is influenced by the situation of the utterance, the participants in the

communicative act and by the adopted speech (oral or written) genre.

Media convergence

Old and new media interact in complex ways.

Orality has not disappeared.

Media convergence is linked to the study of multimodal communication. In the digital

age, different modes have technically become the same as they can be operated by one

multi-skilled person.

Language cannot be considered in isolation from meaning but is a socially situated

semiotic resource (Halliday).

Discourse:

1. Represents the world (ideational function)

2. Enacts social relations (interpersonal function)

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News discourse supports the interests of powerful groups through language which

assumes a stable structure of ideological meanings.

Hegemony: in order to be understood, people draw on shared meanings and, in order to

have some force, they draw and align themselves with dominant structures of meaning

in the community in which they are speaking.

10/10/2018

Discourse represents the world (ideational function) and enacts social relations

(interpersonal function). News discourse supports the interests of powerful groups through

language which assumes a stable structure of ideological meaning → when we read news,

we don’t necessarily read a lie, we read a representation of reality from a certain point of

view.

Hegemony in order to be understood, people draw on shared meanings and, in order to

have some force, they draw and align themselves with dominant structures of meaning in

the community in which they are speaking; some of these structures of meaning are so

firmly established that they are treated as common knowledge in media by journalists, talk-

show, hosts, etc. and they shape discourse in a way that makes them appear natural,

ordinary or common sense.

Media genres recontextualize and transform social practices (political, governmental, etc.)

and are recontextualized in the texts and interactions of different practices, including

everyday life e.g. everyday conversations.

Chains of text and media(tion): implies the movement of meaning from one social practice

to another, from one event to another, from one text to another. According to Fairclough

(2003), “journalists write newspaper articles on the basis of a variety of sources – written

documents, speeches, interviews, and so forth – and the articles are read by those who

buy the newspaper and may be responded to in a variety of other texts – conversations

about news, perhaps if the story is a particular significant one, further stories in other

newspaper or on television, and so on. The ‘chain’ or ‘network’ of texts in this case

includes quite a number of different types of texts”. The movement across genres may

lead to genre mixing and interdiscursivity due to the relationship of texts with preceding or

following texts in the genre chain, as in the case of institutional press releases and news

report.

New media have become part of new discourse e.g. tweeting is not accepted as a

legitimate news reporting platform, bur some of the most important stories are often

broken on Twitter.

Evaluation → writer’s expression of opinion or subjectivity. Evaluation is multifunctional

and is used to express stance, ideological and political positioning, to construe news

values and to engage an audience. To be persuasive, writers need to connect with the

value system of their discourse community and every instance of evaluation is an act that

is socially situated in a disciplinary or institutional context (Hydland, 2005).

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Discourse Strategies in Contemporary English – M. DEMATA 2018-2019

Parameters of evaluation:

 According to Hunston and Thompson: goodness/badness, certainty, expectedness,

importance.

 According to Bednarek: importance, comprehensibility, possibility or ability,

necessity, emotivity, genuiness or authenticity, reliability, expectedness, evidentially,

mental state.

Resources to express evaluation include both lexical and grammatical means and vary in

the way in which they semantically express opinion and positively or negatively evaluate

people, events or propositions → the Appraisal Framework mainly focuses on

lexicogrammar and discourse semantics level (how meanings are constructed socially).

Emotions, tastes and assessments may be explicitly inscribed in discourse through the

use of attitudinal lexis or implicitly invoked through implicature → selection of ideational

meanings which is enough to invoke evaluation even in the absence of lexis that tell us

directly how to feel.

Newsworthiness

Media rhetoric’s: influenced by information and persuasion.

Information: content, events or raw material for interpretation.

News media does not just present news, granting it objectivity and truthfulness, but they

construct events or actions through selection, organization and presentation.

News discourse/Media discourse

“Hard” news: claims truthfulness, but some form of evaluation is usually conveyed or

activated in the report either explicitly or implicitly.

News values

News values are the journalists’ assumptions about what is important. They are also “the

preferences of the expected audience” (Richardson 2007).

The selection or enhancement of news through editing of certain events and social actors

depends on how they meet news values criteria: prominent social actors are selected for

their identity, while non-elite news enters the news if something negative or unexpected

happens to them.

Fowler and van Dijk: newsworthiness is created through intersubjective mental categories

or internalized assumptions.

Bednarek and Caple: discourse perspective. Newsworthiness is not inherent in events but



established through language and image. (picture table 1.1 libro Russo)

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Discourse Strategies in Contemporary English – M. DEMATA 2018-2019

News values are the discoursive construction of the “newsworthy” aspects of actors,

happenings and issues.

Most editing is done to maximize news values by changing the structure of a story,

foregrounding newsworthy aspects, cutting and substituting lexicon, emphasizing the

authority of sources, etc.

(picture table 1.2 libro Russo)

Climate Change

Political and media debates

Impact of journalism on people’s opinions on climate change

The awareness, attitudes and actions of citizens towards climate change have been

shaped by mediatized information.

Paradox of climate change debate

Almost unanimous consensus among scientist on anthropogenic climate change science

VS overrepresentation of the opinion of very few skeptical scientists

+ influence of lobbyists

15/10/2018

Reporting climate change news

1991-1996 personalization, dramatization. Novelty, sensationalism

1997 Kyoto protocol

1997-2003 preference for scandals about backstage issues (interests and commitments of

actors involved in science-making.

th

12 December 2015: 195 nations met in Paris at the United Nation Framework Convention

on Climate Change and sign the first legally binding document on climate change

(UNFCCC).

“An historic agreement to combat climate change and unleash actions and investment

towards a low carbon, resilient and sustainable future”.

Climate Change Discussed by:

 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

 Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC)

 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

 World Trade Organization (WTO)

 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Mediation between science, policy-making and media (and ultimately public opinion).

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Discourse Strategies in Contemporary English – M. DEMATA 2018-2019

Climate-induced migration: contested definition

Eco-refugee

- Environmental refugee

- Environmental migrant

- Forced environmental migrant

- Environmentally motivated migrant

- Climate refugee

- Climate change refugee

- Environmentally displaced person

- Disaster refugee

- Environmental displace

- Eco-refugee

- Ecological displaced person

- Environmental refugee-to-be

- 

Diffe