Adopting a Critical Discourse Analytical Approach to the Mediation of Sociolinguistic Reality in Mass Culture: The Case of Youth Language in Advertising

Abstract

The way sociolinguistic phenomena such as linguistic variation are mediated through mass cultural texts has not been a privileged area of research in early variationist sociolinguistics. On the other hand, despite being a social theory of language, critical discourse analysis has not much examined how particular linguistic variation phenomena (e.g., geographical or social dialects) are mediated, and the (language) ideologies knitted to this mediation. In the present study, I adopt a critical discourse analytical approach so that it serves as a complement to the existing stylistic-variationist tradition. In this way, I hope to address the ideological aspects implicated in the mediation of sociolinguistic reality in mass culture. To illustrate this approach, I draw upon empirical data from Greek TV commercials, which construct images of youth language.