Lingua Inglese e Comunicazione Multimediale, prof Silvia Masi

Lingua inglese e comunicazione multimediale

The internet as a medium – "Internet Linguistics"

Speech is time-bound, dynamic, and transient: interaction in which both participants are present. With speech, there is no time lag between production and reception. Facial expression and gesture aid meaning (feedback). Speech sentences are normal and often of considerable complexity. Unique features of speech include most of the prosody (intonation, pause): it cannot be written down with much efficiency.

Writing is space-bound, static, permanent: the writer is distant from the reader and often does not know who the reader is going to be. Writing allows repeated readings; units of discourse are usually easy to identify through punctuation and layout. With writing, there isn’t immediate feedback. Writing displays multiple instances of subordination in the same sentence. Unique features of writing include pages, line, and spatial organization.

Internet language has similarities with speech and writing. Web functions are no different from traditional situations that use writing. In contrast, email, chat, and instant messaging display several of the core properties of speech. Instant messaging can approximate dynamic conversation, though lacking the property of simultaneous feedback.

At one extreme, we find the web, which displays the same range of written constructions and graphic options as would be found in the corresponding texts of traditional print (online government reports, newspaper editions have a great deal in common with their offline equivalents). At the other extreme, tweeting reduces the grammatical and graphic options (some blogs are highly crafted, others are wildly erratic).

Differences with speech

• The most important difference is the lack of simultaneous feedback. In a conversation, speakers modify their speech according to feedback. The lack of these features is one of the reasons why so many Internet interactions are misperceived (mal percepito).
• Awareness of the dangers of ambiguity led to the development of emoticons. The new symbols were intended to remove attitudinal ambiguity. However, an individual emoticon can still allow many readings and these can be disambiguated only by referring to the verbal context.
• Multiple conversation: messages are posted to a screen linearly, in the order in which they are received by the system. There are different lags because of the way packets of information are sent electronically through different global routes. The intervening utterances may cause ambiguity because they are grammatically and semantically unrelated. The relevant reply is signposted through the use of response grammar and by lexical items belonging to the semantic field of the question.

Differences with writing

• Hypertext links: the color-coded element on the screen that users click on when they want to move from one part of the system to another. It has parallels in some of the conventions of traditional written text (e.g., footnote, biographical citation). Now, links between sites are partial and often not reciprocated.
• Persistence: traditional writing is static and permanent on the page; by contrast, a page on the web often varies: The web pages are refreshed by the owner, continually updated. The text can be modified with an ease and undetectability that is not possible when people try to alter a traditionally written text.
• Multiple authorship: in wiki-type pages, there are readers that may alter a traditionally written text (it makes text heterogeneous). Into the web, everything is diachronic.

The language of the internet cannot be identified with spoken or written; it shares some features with both. Susan Herring, for promoting the description of internet text, uses the notion of facets: technological facets characterize the medium (Synchronicity, Length, Identity, Audience, Persistence) and social facets characterize relationships between users, norms of language, participant characteristics.

Language change – "Internet Linguistics"

Before the Internet, it would take several years before a new word would achieve a sufficiently high community profile to appear in print. Today, a new word can achieve a global profile within hours. The Internet will speed up the process of language change.

Vocabulary: the focus has to be on words that have arisen directly as a result of the Internet (e.g., "blog" → blogging). The emergence of a new area of internet activity always generates a great deal of enthusiastic neologizing (Twittonary is one of the online dictionaries that collects terms invented in connection with Twitter). Most of these are to have a short linguistic life. Just a few will be long-term additions to the language. Internet terminology has had an influence on everyday speech and writing. There are words that have developed alternative senses of a nontechnical kind when used figuratively in conversation (e.g., "offline" in the sense of "unavailable"). Also, Internet abbreviations are heard outside of the domain of electronic communication (e.g., "LOL").

Orthography: messages that omit punctuation, avoid capital letters, and have little or no typographical contrastivity. It is the reduced system which has attracted most attention because some people see the use of nonstandard forms as a symptom of decline. Age, gender, educational background, and personality influence the outcome. Older people tend to be linguistically more conservative than younger. Women use more exclamation than men. The lower-case default mentality means that any use of capitalization is a strongly marked form of communication: messages entirely in capitals are considered to be "shouting".

Grammar: there isn’t the standardizing process normal of other forms of publication. As a consequence, we find syntactic patterns that are never seen in traditional written varieties.

Pragmatics: the study of the intention or the effect: anonymity is an important factor and when identity is unknown, language can result uninhibited. A web page can be used for a range of purposes: give assistance, evaluate a product, obtain feedback. How is the one to ensure that a website appears in the first few hits in a search? With frequency of hypertext links (non-linguistic technique) or to include keywords. Controls and constraints to avoid abuses: there are moderators or automatic censure.

Styles: each media becomes associated with a particular kind of language and the new variety of language resulting from each technological innovation have always added to whatever existed before. The online activity has resulted in novel language management (new intermediaries such as web designers, developers, and administrators: new outputs such as email, chat, gaming). The web is so diverse that it makes little sense to talk about "the language of the web at all".

Key concepts in language and media – "Language and Media"

We encounter different varieties of language (newspaper, email, chat) and, in each, choices are made. Patterns of choices are developed over the course of discourse to make the style of a discourse appear unified. The unified appearance of such choices is often referred to as genre.

Register, as a language variety, may be confused with the notion of genre. When we think of different types of media discourse, such as those found in tabloid newspapers, adverts, television soaps, we are thinking about different genres or text types. Each type is identifiable because of specific features commonly associated with both its form and function. When we are faced with variation according to different situations and functions, the linguistic term is register. This term describes a variety of language which is distinctive for a specific context. It is a combination of choices that a speaker makes in each area of language graduation: vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and layout.

An accent describes variation at the phonological or sound level. By contrast, a dialect describes variations not only at the phonological level but also at the level of lexis (vocabulary) and syntax (grammar). Dialects are the broad range of social as well as regional varieties. Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent most identified with the BBC (sometimes it is also known as the Queen’s English or Public School English). In the 19th century, "standard pronunciation" of English was largely associated with the army, public schools, universities, and civil service. RP is not associated with a region or a country, but it is an accent of socio-economic status, most notably membership of a traditional upper class. RP became much more influential as a style of speaking when the first head of BBC adopted it in the early 1920s as the preferred broadcasting standard, hence the term BBC English. More recently, there has been a shift in Britain towards regional accents among television and radio presenters. With less than 2% of the British population speaking with an RP accent, this "standard" has been increasingly widely recognized as no longer reflecting the voice of the majority of the audience.

There are 3 different approaches to speech and writing differences:

• Opposition view of speech and writing: the two mediums are considered to have clear, contrasting characteristics. So, writing is objective, a monologue, formal; speech is interpersonal, a dialogue, informal.
• Continuum view of speech and writing: it looks at speech and writing in variable contexts of use. So, an example of the continuum is: traditional writing (word processors), telephones, videophones, face-to-face speech (teleconferencing).
• Cross-over view of speech and writing: while a linguistic message may have been designed to be spoken or to be written, it may be experienced in a medium other than the one in which it originated. This is what happens with "talking books," for example, in which a written version is read aloud on audio cassette.

Mediated communication – "Language and Media"

With media utterances, the relationship between participants is "mediated" by media technology that extends or transforms the properties of verbal communication. Some of the key features of media communication events are developments, in different ways, from a default structure of face-to-face interaction. Ferdinand de Saussure: "A’s thoughts are converted into an utterance conveyed along a channel to B; B decodes the message into thought that resembles A’s original thought". Each assumes the role of sender and receiver in turn.

Roman Jakobson: the context dimension of a communication plays an important role in how information is conveyed. He identifies functions that are not mutually exclusive: in any given text they function together, but they form a changing hierarchy in different text (context, code, emotion…).

Communicative events in the media take many forms. At one end of a scale, they can still be "dyadic communication" (e.g., phone conversation). At the other end is what people traditionally think of as "mass communication" (e.g., radio, television).

Major features: directed towards a large audience, are public (content is open to all), audience contain many different kinds of people, can establish contact simultaneously with large numbers of people at a distance from the source. Involves people coming together because of some common interest. Communication media vary on a range of dimensions: role reversibility (interactivity), co-presence/distances, co-temporality (real-time), and permanence.

Media "speech" is also reproducible in different circumstances from those in which it was created. In broadcast form, media speech tends to require a scale of investment from which financial return or benefit will be expected. Interactivity: the degree of interaction with material presented by the machine varies (between users, creating two-way forms of communication). New mixed forms are changing our media discourse environment, which is presently one in which face-to-face interaction coexists with many other modalities of more or less mediated and more or less interactive discourse.

The mediated character of verbal discourse contributes to a fundamental redrawing of lines between personal and public. Personal communications become something you can read or listen to again and again. You can contribute to the public display of the personal yourself by blogging, social networking, or online discussion.

Media discourse genres – "Language and Media"

We can distinguish typical features of a chat show from a political interview, a scripted soap from reality TV, and an email from a text message. "Genre", in this sense, is a generalization or abstraction from specific textual properties. Number of ways in which genres can be classified on the basis of properties:

• Formal arrangement (structure, e.g., sonnet, poetry)
• Topic (e.g., biography, drama)
• Mode of address (how the text addresses its audience)
• Attitude or anticipated response (how the audience’s response is elicited in a variety of ways)

Genres are importantly about expectations that people bring with them when they go to see a particular type of film. It helps audiences to make sense of chapter and plot, for example.

One film that does not fit into any one obvious genre is "From Dusk Till Dawn". It has been described as belonging to a number of genres (action, horror, vampire, and suspense genre). None of these categories, on its own, captures what the film is about.

Media rhetorics – "Language and Media"

Two kinds of significance stand out in media language: whether it conveys information and how far it seeks to persuade us towards some particular viewpoint or course of action. These two main functions of media language create the huge influence that media discourse exerts. The persuasive techniques used in discourse may be grouped together and called "rhetoric". Information is intertwined with the means by which it is presented. We should therefore ask if information is affected by the particular media forms that express it. Kinds of discourse are overtly forms of persuasion and advocacy and are clearly based on a given point of view (blogs, personal reports). An address must work out whether what is "being presented" is "information" or whether the discourse is trying to be persuasive. Working this out calls for understanding the genre or idiom of discourse. If you are looking for information on the internet, it matters whether the information you find is accurate and fair (important with the genre of news). It is an increasingly important part of modern media literacy (alfabetizzazione) to distinguish fact from opinion and well-founded views and advocacy from scams, manipulation, and deception. It is often designed in ways that seek to make it appear especially relevant, urgent, or sensational. The resulting styles of rhetoric may try to arouse emotion, make what is said especially memorable.

Rhetoric is not just persuasive speech but persuasive public speech. Rhetoric originates in classical Greek times. According to Aristotle, there are three ways that an audience can be persuaded:

• Ethos (audiences believe the speaker to be fair and honest)
• Pathos (what is said arouses emotion)
• Logos (audiences are persuaded by reasoning)

The devices they used can be categorized into three areas:

• Lexical choices (register)
• Figurative language (metaphor and metonymy)
• Sound patterning (alliteration, assonance, rhyme)

Metaphor: can involve ordinary words or phrases that routinely present one (usually more abstract) field in terms associated with another (usually more concrete) field. It is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Media storytelling – "Language and Media"

The psychologist Jerome Bruner suggests that there is an "innate" human propensity to organize events into memorable stories. This is also common as a rhetorical vehicle for news, documentary, and advertising. Stories are useful as illustrations or ways of propagating points in favor of an organization. Stories function as vehicles for stereotypes and are used for that purpose in propaganda and to manipulate.

To make a good story, the plot must consist of three conditions that combine to form a minimum structure:

• Temporality (the beginning, middle, and final state)
• Causation (the middle state causes the final state)
• Human interest (without this, there is no narrative)

A narrative illustrates a "sort of general truth with implications for the world in which the story is told as well as for the impact of events in the story itself". Media storytelling, including stories found in news, presents many examples both of first-person accounts of events and more distanced and impersonal styles of reporting. Moreover, news stories are produced with a particular audience in mind (e.g., an advertisement that appears in a newspaper appeals for donations to help victims of chemical poisoning. The opening paragraphs resemble a fictional novel. It is a personalized, subjective account of one family’s experience that draws readers' attention. The advert is first presented as a story: it recounts the suffering of victims). The impact of narrative in advertisements is considerable because of the introduction of characters and emotive details.

Words and images – "Language and Media"

Media texts are combined with image, sound, and music. There is an interaction between language (words and phrases) and "media language" (words, images, and sounds). Many media appear primarily visual. Historically, there have been a range of forms of combination: illustrated books, captions added to paintings, taglines in posters. Even with text that have no pictures, we might say that features of design (font, color, layout) are significant in our perception of printed text. One reason why television news is considered so believable is