Discourse and communication: New approaches to the analysis of mass media discourse and communication Edited by Teun A. van Dijk (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS175 contact and linguistic diffusion—a deficiency in the contact literature diagnosed by Franklin Southworth as the need for a 'more precise sociolinguistic typology of outcomes of language contact' (1971:256). But actually, in this time of renewed and diverse interest in language contact phenomena (e.g. Dorian 1981, 1989, Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985, Thomason & Kaufman 1988), the Hills' book provides what is most clearly lacking—a detailed study that examines language contact in the context of the social lives of the speakers. REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. M. 1980. The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen L. Levinson. 1978. Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. Questions and politeness, ed. by Esther N. Goody, 56289 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dorian, Nancy. 1981. Language death: The life cycle of a Scottish Gaelic dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ------ (ed.) 1989. Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dozier, Edward P. 1951. Two examples oflinguistic acculturation: The Yaqui of Sonora and Arizona and the Tewa of New Mexico. Lg. 32.146-51. Ferguson, Charles A. 1959. Diglossia. Word 15.325-40. Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse strategies, Ch. 4: Conversational code-switching, 59-99. New York: Cambridge University Press. Haugen, Einar. 1953. The Norwegian language in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kroskrity, Paul V. 1982. Language contact and linguistic diffusion: The Arizona Tewa speech community. Bilingualism and language contact: Spanish, English, and Native American languages, ed. by F. Barkin, E. A. Brandt, and J. Ornstein-Galicia, 51-72. New York: Teachers College Press. Le Page, R. B., and Andrée Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scollon, Ronald. 1979. Variable data and linguistic convergence: Texts and contexts in Chipewyan. Language in Society 8: 223-42. Southworth, Franklin C. 1971. Detecting prior creolization: An analysis of the historical origins of Marathi. Pidginization and creolization of languages, ed. by Dell H. Hymes, 255-73. London: Cambridge University Press. Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization , and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in contact: Findings and problems. The Hague: Mouton. Department of Anthropology[Received 16 October 1989.] 341 Haines Hall University of California Los Angeles, CA 90024 Discourse and communication: New approaches to the analysis of mass media discourse and communication. Edited by Teun A. van Dijk. (Research in Text Theory 10.) Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985. Pp. viii, 367. $104.00. Reviewed by Doris Payne, University of Oregon This volume aims to show how mass media (MM) texts can be analyzed in more systematic and explicit terms than has usually been done until now. Lin- 176LANGUAGE, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 1 (1990) guists should be forewarned that they will not find what they might have expected from the volume and series titles: the definition of 'discourse' here is generally broader than, if not different from, that assumed in linguistics. John D. H. Downing, for example, explicitly states, 'By "discourse" I mean "ideology -in-verbal-process-of-construction" ' (298). Most of the essays are influenced more by a sociological than by a linguistic perspective; they are concerned with social, economic, and political questions about the sources, recipients, and ideologies shaping MM. A primary claim made by several authors is that MM discourse invariably sides with the established institutional point of view, whether it be that of a news enterprise, a government institution, or a multinational corporation. With two notable exceptions (Schlesinger & Lumley and Hartley & Montgomery), they do not clearly acknowledge the impossibility of presenting a truly neutral point of view. The first nine essays and the introduction are theoretical, historical, and typological in tone; the remaining seven articles include actual analyses. In my view, only five to six of the seventeen papers deal in a carefully argued way with linguistic and cognitive structures found in MM discourse. I will depart from the organization which van Dijk provides for the papers in his 'Introduction : Discourse analysis in (mass) communication research' (1-9), and discuss the more linguistically oriented papers first. 'Structures of news in the press', by Teun A. van Dijk (69-93), provides a framework...