Suchergebnisse

This paper studies from a linguistic-pragmatic perspective the construction of potentially ideological meanings related to journalistic choice-making practices in the contexts of local and foreign news reporting against the background of the globalization of news. In particular, it examines the discourse of hard news reports about Kenya's post-election crisis in the national newspapers Daily Nation and The Standard as compared to thematically-related foreign correspondence from The Independent and The Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post. By means of a combined methodology, comprising a quantitative content analysis, a qualitative discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, two frames of meaning are identified: a tribal and a socio-political frame. From an international perspective, American and British newspapers primarily ethnicized the events, while they tended to be politicized in the local Kenyan press. The differences in language use can be partly explained by contextual (political, social and pragmatic) factors. Thus the interpretive results can be supported, refined or nuanced by information from ethnographic fieldwork, which also allows us to take both global and local journalistic voices into account. ; En este artículo se estudia desde una perspectiva lingüístico-pragmática la construcción de significados potencialmente ideológicos en relación con las prácticas de selección en contextos de periodismo nacional e internacional. Más en concreto, se analiza el discurso en noticias concretas sobre la crisis poselectoral en Kenia en periódicos nacionales como Daily Nation y The Standard, en comparación con noticias temáticamente relacionadas en The Independent y The Times (de Gran Bretaña), The New York Times y The Washington Post (de EE.UU.). Por vía de una metodología combinada (un análisis cuantitativo del contenido, un análisis cualitativo del discurso y trabajo de campo etnográfico) se pueden identificar dos marcos de conceptualización: un marco tribal y otro socio-político. Resulta que los periódicos americanos y británicos prefieren representar los eventos desde un punto de vista étnico. La prensa keniana, en cambio, tiende a adoptar una perspectiva política. Las diferencias en el lenguaje se dejan explicar parcialmente por factores contextuales (políticos, sociales y pragmáticos). Por consiguiente, los resultados del análisis del discurso pueden ser confirmados, refinados y matizados por datos procedentes del trabajo de campo, lo cual al mismo tiempo permite incorporar en el estudio las voces de los periodistas.

This paper studies from a linguistic-pragmatic perspective the construction of possibly ideological meanings and journalistic choice-making in the contexts of local and foreign news reporting. In particular, it examines the discourse of hard news reports about Kenya's post-election crisis in the national newspapers Daily Nation and The Standard as compared to thematically-related reports from The Independent and The Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post. By means of a combined methodology, comprising a quantitative content analysis, a qualitative discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, two frames of meaning are identified: a tribal and a socio-political frame. American and British newspapers primarily ethnicized the events, while they tended to be politicized in the Kenyan press. The differences in language use can be partly explained by contextual (political, social and pragmatic) factors. Thus the interpretive discourse-analytical results can be supported, refined or nuanced by information from ethnographic fieldwork, which also allows to take journalistic voices into account.

This paper studies how language is used on Twitter by Belgian and Spanish politicians in the context of the 2014 European elections campaign. Taking a pragmatic perspective on language use, we investigate three interrelated aspects of political communication on Twitter: (i) how political candidates adapt their language to the technological affordances of Twitter; (ii) which linguistic strategies the politicians use to express self-reference in function of different communicative goals and in relation to contextual factors such as ideological profile or nationality; and (iii) how some of the image building and community building strategies can be interpreted as reflexive signs of metapragmatic awareness. This study shows that the practice of self-referencing is a prominent feature of politicians' discourse on Twitter, which is used as a tool for professional communication, as most of the self-references refer to professional rather than private identities. When spreading tweets, the studied Belgian and Spanish politicians use a number of adaptability strategies. They use conciseness strategies, such as subject pronoun ellipsis and full subject NP constructions of a first person plural verb form in Spanish and Catalan, to accommodate to the 140 character constraint of the microblogging service. To express identities the politicians not only make use of first person pronouns, but also use the Twitter handle, the hashtag or proper nouns, referring to themselves in the third person. This practice shows that Twitter is not only a tool for professional political communication, but also a tool for personal branding. To end, it is argued that different linguistic choices show signs of metapragmatic awareness with the politicians reflecting on the communicative practice in which they are involved, indicating that they creatively use this type of social media to render their campaign talk searchable and 'followable'.