A Pragmatic Study of CNN and BBC News Headlines Covering the Syrian Conflict (original) (raw)
Related papers
Pragmatics of Political News Reports Worthiness
International Journal of English Linguistics
With the numerousness of political events and the competition among news media channels, news manufacturing becomes highly weighty to attract audience's attention aiming at changing their minds. As such, news reporters tend to pick out certain events that can be viewed as newsworthy. However, news manufacturing turns to be the reporters’ main interest and the various ways used to fulfill this purpose fall into their primary tasks. Among these ways, pragmatic mechanisms of language stand as the most appropriate means to create such newsworthiness. Thus, this study has set itself the task to be after these pragmatic mechanisms as employed by CNN reporters in their attempts to initiate, construct and maximize newsworthiness of the events in question. The findings attained at by this study fully verify some of its hypotheses and partially vindicate other ones.
2018
In the last three decades, Speech Act Theory has been displaced from the spotlight of pragmatic research and relegated to the back seat of this field. This has been the case despite the potential this theory still has to serve pragmatic research. This study is an attempt to revive and develop speech act theory by means of applying it to interactive naturally-occurring discourse proposing a number of different types of speech act and incorporating into analysis a wider range of pragmatic IFIDs. The main purpose of the study is to: (1) investigate speech acts in interaction and find out which ‗illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) are used to identify speech acts in an interactive context, and (2) compare the investigated speech acts and IFIDs cross-culturally between English and Arabic. Regarding data, the study investigated 12 English and Arabic short news interviews (six each). Some of these were video-recorded live from BBC and Sky news channels (English dataset) and Al-Arabiya, Sky news Arabia and Al-Wataniya channels (Arabic dataset). Other interviews were downloaded from YouTube. Two topics were the focus of these interviews: (1) the immigration crisis in 2015 (six English and Arabic interviews), and (2) the Iranian nuclear deal in 2015 (six English and Arabic interviews). The study investigated the two datasets to find which speech acts are used in short news interviews and what interactional IFIDs are used to identify them. Results show that many different speech acts are used in news interviews — the study counted 48 individual speech acts in the analysed interviews. However, it was found that a mere itemizing and classification of speech acts in the classical sense (Austin‘s and Searle‘s classifications) was not enough. In addition, the study identifies various new types of speech acts according to the role they play in the ongoing discourse.The first type is termed ‗turn speech acts‘. These are speech acts which have special status in the turn they occur in and are of two subtypes: ‗main act‘ and ‗overall speech act‘. The second type is ‗interactional acts‘. These are speech acts which are named in relation to other speech acts in the same exchange. The third type is ‗superior speech acts‘. These are superordinate speech acts with the performance of which other subordinate (inferior) speech acts are performed as well. The study also found three different types of utterances vis-à-vis the speech acts they perform. These are ‗single utterance‘ (which performs a single speech act only), ‗double-edged utterance‘ (which performs two speech acts concurrently) ii and ‗Fala utterance‘ (which performs three speech acts together). As for IFIDs, the study found that several already-established pragmatic concepts can help identify speech acts in interaction. These are Adjacency Pair, Activity Type, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, Facework, Context (Co-utterance and Pragmalinguistic cues). These devices are new additions to Searle‘s original list of IFIDs. Furthermore, they are expanding this concept as they include a type of IFID different from the original ones. Finally, the study has found no significant differences between English and Arabic news interviews as regards speech acts (types), utterance types and the analysed IFIDs. The study attracts attention to Speech Act Theory and encourages further involvement of this theory in other genres of interactive discourse (e.g., long interviews, chat shows, written internet chat, etc.). It also encourages further exploration of the different types of speech acts and utterances discussed in this study as well as probing the currently-investigated and other IFIDs. It is hoped that by returning to the core insight of SAT (i.e., that language-in-use does things) and at the same time freeing it from its pragmalinguistic shackles, its value can be seen more clearly.
Comparative Pragmatic Study of Print Media Discourse in Baluchistan Newspapers Headlines
Al-Burz, 2020
In the last two decades the power of mass media has influenced the society and recently, the public interest for media activities has increased tremendously. Similarly, in this advanced technological age, many jobs are associated with media coverage, for example, military actions, affiliation of public with political and social activities, and intentions, actions and attitudes of community etc. For the transmission of these actions in news and newspapers headlines, powerful and influencing strategies are adopted in the use of language. Many characteristics of language are determined through its use and one of them is known as pragmatic approach. But, in Baluchistan context neither, an appropriate focus is provided to research study for pragmatic analysis nor is Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts studied in Baluchistan newspapers headlines. In this research, efforts have been made to fill up this gap in existing literature. The sample of study is selected from three Baluchistan newsp...
An Exploratory Study of Pragmatic Inferences in Journalistic Texts
2015
In order to deal competently with the process of communication, one must be able to calculate highly detailed inferences about the nature of assumptions speaker and addressee are making. One should also understand the purposes for which utterances are being used. The ability to calculate these inferences in both production and interpretation is called ‘pragmatics’. The study has tried to explain this theory within the context of journalism so that its assigned role in linguistic theory can clearly be identified. Chapter two provides insights into the four pragmatic inferences (deixis, speech act, implicature, presupposition); it also draws boundaries between pragmatics, and other fields like sociolinguistics, psycholinguistic, and semantics. The chapter also provides the reader with some stylistic features of writing in journalism. Chapter three is a review of twentytwo empirical studies on these inferences. Its main aim is to familiarize the reader with the nature of these inferenc...
Topicality as War News Value: A Pragma – Linguistic Study
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2017
This paper discusses one of the criteria of war news values in printed media. The current study concerns itself with only Topicality as the target of scrutiny. It explores this value through the application of a model of analysis based on a pragma-linguistic approach. The analysis is intended to achieve the following aims: first, bringing topicality as one criterion of news values to the attention of pragmatists; second, introducing an analytical framework which is hoped to be useful for pragmatists to analyze news values, and to be available in their hands for further development. This framework aims at explicitly revealing the linguistic as well as the pragmatic properties of the war news texts as far as topicality is concerned. In relation to the aims of the study and owing to the fact that people are eager to understand what is going on, it is hypothesized that topicality comes into viewable interaction between grammar and pragmatics. The findings of the data analysis indicate how topicality is transferred to the receiver of the message and how it shapes news reporting.
The Language in News Discourse
1 3 / 0 5 / 2 0 1 5 As people living in a globalized world, it is necessary to be informed about the events happening all over the world. For that aim, newspapers bring citizens the more accurate information about every problem that occurs in any part of the Earth. However, some news can be related in a biased point of view, especially looking at ideology or at language features. That is why in this project, the same report has been used by different newspapers, they are Friends pay tribute after four killed in Powys car crash published by The Guardian on 9 th March 2015, and Two more teenagers killed in tragic weekend on roads published by Ian Johnson in i 1 The essential daily briefing from The Independent on 9 th March of 2015. The aim of this project is to show how the different features in a report work in different newspaper.
PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF PUBLICISTIC HEADLINES
MENTAL ENLIGHTENMENT SCIENTIFIC -METHODOLOGICAL JOURNAL, 2023
Pre-translation journalistic text analysis is an integral part of an efficient translation procedure in mass media. In fact, it focuses on collecting information on the text under translation. Collecting the intra-textual information is mainly based on a thorough analysis of the source text pragmatic peculiarities, whereas the extra-textual information focuses basically on the communicative functional properties of both source and target texts. There exist different approaches towards this procedure and the stages of its accomplishment. Nonetheless, it should be noted that they all lead to a broader spectrum of discourse analysis with its intra-textual and extra-textual parameters and give birth to the translationoriented pragmatic analysis before initiating translation process itself. The article focuses on the interrelation and interaction of all the mentioned types of analysis (pragmatic analysis, pretranslation analysis) as an essential requirement for a relevant translation of headlines.
In the last three decades, Speech Act Theory has been displaced from the spotlight of pragmatic research and relegated to the back seat of this field. This has been the case despite the potential this theory still has to serve pragmatic research. This study is an attempt to revive and develop speech act theory by means of applying it to interactive naturally-occurring discourse proposing a number of different types of speech act and incorporating into analysis a wider range of pragmatic IFIDs. The main purpose of the study is to: (1) investigate speech acts in interaction and find out which ‗illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) are used to identify speech acts in an interactive context, and (2) compare the investigated speech acts and IFIDs cross-culturally between English and Arabic. Regarding data, the study investigated 12 English and Arabic short news interviews (six each). Some of these were video-recorded live from BBC and Sky news channels (English dataset) and Al-Arabiya, Sky news Arabia and Al-Wataniya channels (Arabic dataset). Other interviews were downloaded from YouTube. Two topics were the focus of these interviews: (1) the immigration crisis in 2015 (six English and Arabic interviews), and (2) the Iranian nuclear deal in 2015 (six English and Arabic interviews). The study investigated the two datasets to find which speech acts are used in short news interviews and what interactional IFIDs are used to identify them. Results show that many different speech acts are used in news interviewsthe study counted 48 individual speech acts in the analysed interviews. However, it was found that a mere itemizing and classification of speech acts in the classical sense (Austin's and Searle's classifications) was not enough. In addition, the study identifies various new types of speech acts according to the role they play in the ongoing discourse.The first type is termed ‗turn speech acts'. These are speech acts which have special status in the turn they occur in and are of two subtypes: ‗main act' and ‗overall speech act'. The second type is ‗interactional acts'. These are speech acts which are named in relation to other speech acts in the same exchange. The third type is ‗superior speech acts'. These are superordinate speech acts with the performance of which other subordinate (inferior) speech acts are performed as well. The study also found three different types of utterances vis-à-vis the speech acts they perform. These are ‗single utterance' (which performs a single speech act only), ‗double-edged utterance' (which performs two speech acts concurrently) In the name of Allah the Most Gracious the Most Merciful All praise and thanks are to the Almighty Allah for His showers of blessings and for giving me the power, courage, and patience to complete my study. I offer to Him all gratitude and seek His assistance, forgiveness, and guidance to the right path. First and foremost I would like to thank and express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Jim O'Driscoll for being tremendous mentor for me. I do appreciate his support, encouragement and valuable advice and remarks during my work on this thesis. His confidence in my work has always inspired and pushed me in the right direction. Not forgotten, my appreciation to my cosupervisor, Prof. Daniel Ka'da'r for his help in my project. A very special gratitude goes out to my family, my parents, brothers and sisters who have provided me with moral and emotional support throughout the past four years. I am really grateful to your prayers which have sustained me thus far. I must express my very profound gratitude to my beloved husband who provided me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement along the way. A big ‗thank you' goes also to my baby, the best daughter I could ever have. One look in your eyes, baby, was enough to give me the strength to overcome all the difficulties and push me forward when I was about to give up. I am also grateful to the government of my country represented by the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research for funding this project. And finally, last but by no means least, I express my thanks to my friends and colleagues and everyone who provided me with any kind of help during my pursuit of my PhD degree.
Interactive Evaluation of Pragmatic Features in Spoken Journalistic Texts
The designed annotation tool intends to facilitate the evaluation of pragmatic features in spoken political and journalistic texts, in particular, interviews, live conversations in the Media and discussions in Parliament. The evaluation of pragmatic features focuses in the discourse component of spoken political and journalistic texts, in addition to implied information and connotative features. The present tool may be used by professional journalists and for training purposes, for journalists and other professionals.