Social change and discursive change: analyzing conversationalization of media discourse in Taiwan

Abstract

Adopting Fairclough's multidimensional approach, this corpus-based study explores discursive changes in current Taiwanese society, with a particular focus on conversationalization in printed media. Data were collected from three major newspapers catering to different readerships during three time periods. The analyzed linguistic features include noun phrases, Chinese four-character set expressions, mixing of local dialect(s), and slang. My analysis shows that over the past two decades there has been an increase of conversational features in all three newspapers. In addition, a cross-sectional comparison has revealed that soft news texts (e.g. entertainment news) include more conversational features than hard news texts (e.g. international news). It is also found that the newspaper which stresses local values and advocates an independent Taiwan identity tends to adopt more conversational features, particularly the mixing of Taiwanese in Mandarin news texts. Finally, I suggest that this trend of conversationalization in the Taiwanese press can be linked to substantive democratization and marketization of the Taiwanese society as well as the change and development of modern written Chinese.