Communicating Conflict: Multilingual Case Studies of the News Media

Description

Communicating Conflict brings together a collection of multilingual case studies drawn from the international media. The contributors use methodologies drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics to explore how these texts overtly or covertly advance particular value positions and world views. They pay particular attention to how the reader is positioned with respect to the events being described, and, using appraisal theory, the various voices which are referenced by the text.

Elizabeth Thomson is Senior Lecturer in the School of English Literatures, Philosophy and Languages, at the University of Wollongong, Australia. P. R. R. White is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

"This book is a good resource for researchers dealing with newspaper journalism, and the existing differences and similarities between reporting in different cultures and languages. That is closely connected to one of the main objectives of this collection of essays, which mainly focus on the analysis of reporter-voice - and hard news textual organization - as a means of advancing a particular value position while at the same time backgrounding the writer's attitudinal role. It is for this reason that one of the key positive aspects of this book is that it can be considered an introductory research to the area of comparative analysis of news reporting across cultures... In terms of thematic and content organization...all the articles in the book follow the same theoretical framework - appraisal framework in combination with Systemic Functional Grammar. This allows the reader to follow all the analyses without having to consider - and shift between - different theoretical approaches to the analysis of discourse, and at the same time it increases the book cohesion. Additionally, the book also follows one thematic line, as all the chapters included in it deal with some kind of 'conflict'; something which increases its value as a resource for the study of evaluation in news items... As we can infer from reading this book, one of the main advantages of the appraisal framework is that it provides a tool for the analysis of evaluation in a situation in which finding the linguistic tools through which it can be transmitted is essential..." -Laura Filardo Llamas, The Linguist List, December 12, 2008 'Communicating Conflict makes an important empirical contribution to media and language-in-the-media research. The volume also stands as a useful methodological how-to, providing readers with a concrete, case-study-by-case-study guide that illustrates the application of appraisal theory analysis.' -- Journal of Sociolinguistics