Aligning language to ideology
A socio-semantic analysis of communist and democratic mass media language in Bulgaria
This paper compares and analyzes mass media language in Bulgaria before and after the breakdown of the communist regime with the goal to reveal the effect of political setting, communist vs. democratic, on the form of public discourse in the media. The comparison reveals statistically significant differences in the types of grammatical constructions used in the communist and democratic media (active vs. passive), as well as differences in grammatical properties of nouns (animacy, concreteness, and properness) and verbs (tense and evidentiality). I propose that the observed differences are best explained within a sociocognitive model of context proposed by van Dijk (2008). From this perspective, linguistic characteristics of the democratic and communist discourse examined in the paper reflect speakers’ shared beliefs about the system of social meanings and fundamental principles of their respective societies, such as humanism vs. institutionalism, individualism vs. collectivism, and the differences in the perception of time.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Comparative Analysis: Methodology
- 3.Case Study 1: Agentivity and the Mapping of Semantic Roles
- 3.2Methodology
- 3.2Results
- 3.2Discussion
- 4.Case Study 2: Lexical Properties of Subject Nouns and Nouns’ Individuation
- 4.2Methodology
- 4.2Results
- 4.2Discussion
- 4.2.1Animacy
- 4.2.2Proper names
- 4.2.3Concreteness
- 4.2Individuation: The collective effect of animacy, concreteness, and properness
- 5.Case Study 3: Grammatical Properties of Verbs: Tense and Evidentiality
- 5.2Tense
- 5.2.1Methodology
- 5.2.2Results
- 5.2.3Discussion: Tense
- 5.2Evidentiality
- 5.2.1Methodology
- 5.2.2Results
- 5.2.3Discussion: Evidentiality
- 6.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References (96)
Aikhenvald, Alexandra
2004 Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Albarran, Alan
2004 “
Media Economics.” In
The Sage Handbook of Media Studies, ed. by
John Downing,
Denis McQuail,
Philip Schlesinger, and
Ellen Wartella, 291–308. London & New Delhi: Sage.
Aronson, Howard
1967 “
The Grammatical Categories of the Indicative in the Contemporary Bulgarian Literary Language.” In
To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Vol. 11), 82–98. The Hague: Mouton.
Babel, Anna
2009 “
Dizque, Evidentiality, and Stance in Valley Spanish.”
Language in Society 381: 487–511.
Balabanova, Ekaterina
2007 Media, Wars and Politics. Comparing the Incomparable in Western and Eastern Europe. Hampshire: Ashgate.
Chen, Lily
2004 “
Evaluation in Media Texts: A Cross-cultural Linguistic Investigation.”
Language in Society 331: 673–702.
Comrie, Bernard
1976 Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Comrie, Bernard
1977 “
Subject and Direct Object in Uralic Languages: A Functional Explanation of Case-marking Systems.”
Études Finno-Ougriennes 121: 5–17.
Cottle, Simon
1999 “
Ethnic Minorities and the British News Media: Explaining Misrepresentation.” In
The Media in Britain: Current Debates and Developments, ed. by
Jane Stokes, and
Anna Reading, 191–200. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Dahl, Östen
1985 Tense and Aspect Systems. New York: Blackwell.
Dahl, Östen
2008 “
Animacy and Egophoricity: Grammar, Ontology, and Phylogeny.”
Lingua 1181: 141–50.
Dahl, Östen, and Kari Fraurud
1996 “
Animacy in Grammar and Discourse.” In
Reference and Referent Accessibility, ed. by
Thorstein Fretheim, and
Jeanette Gundel, 47–64. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Davis, Anthony, and Jean-Pierre Koenig
2000 “
Linking as Constraints on Word Classes in a Hierarchical Lexicon.”
Language 761: 56–91.
Deneen, Patrick
2009 “
Progress and Memory: Making Whole our Historical Sense
.” Paper presented at Georgetown University, I.S.I. Honors Program. Georgetown University. (
[URL])
Dowty, David
1991 “
Thematic Proto-roles and Argument Selection.”
Language 671: 547–619.
Fairclough, Norman
1992 Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Fairclough, Norman
1995 Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak
1997 “
Critical Discourse Analysis.” In
Discourse as Social Interaction. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction (Vol. 21), ed. by
Teun van Dijk, 258–284. London: Sage.
Fielder, Grace
1995 “
Narrative Perspective and the Bulgarian L-participle.”
The Slavic and East European Journal 39 (4): 585–600.
Fowler, Roger, Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress, and Tony Trew
1979 Language and Control. London: Routledge.
Fowler, Roger
1991 Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.
Fraurud, Kari
1996 “
Cognitive Ontology and NP Form.” In
Reference and Referent Accessibility, ed. by
Thorstein Fretheim, and
Jeanette Gundel, 65–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Friedman, Victor
1982 “
Reportedness in Bulgarian: Category or Stylistic Variant?”
International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 25/261: 149–163.
Galasińska, Aleksandra, and Michał Krzyžanowski
(eds) 2009 Discourse and Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Galasiński, Dariusz, and Adam Jaworski
1997 “
The Linguistic Construction of Reality in the Black Book of Polish Censorship.”
Discourse and Society 8 (3): 341–357.
Gerganov, Encho, Margarita Dilova, Kristina Petkova, and Elena Paspalanova
1996 “
Culture-specific Approach to the Study of Individualism/Collectivism.”
European Journal of Social Psychology 261: 277–297.
Gramsci, Antonio
1971 Selections from The Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by
Quintin Hoare, and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Greenberg, Joseph
1966 “
Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements.” In
Universals of Language, ed. by
Joseph Greenberg, 73–113. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Grenoble, Lenore
2003 Language Policy in the Former Soviet Union. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.
Gvozdanović, Jadranka
1996 “
Reported Speech in South Slavic.” In
Reported Speech: Forms and Functions of the Verb, ed. by
Theo A.J.M. Janssen, and
Wim van der Wurff, 57–71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hodge, Robert, and Gunther Kress
1979 Language as Ideology. London: Routledge.
Hofstede, Geert
1980 Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-related Values. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Hollander, Gayle
1972 Soviet Political Indoctrination: Development in Mass Media and Propaganda Since Stalin. New York, Washington & London: Praeger Publishers.
Hopper, Paul, and Sandra Thompson
1980 “
Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse.”
Language 561: 281–299.
Horowitz, Juliana
2010
The Post-Communist Generation in the Former Eastern Bloc. Pew Research Center, Pew Global Attitudes Project [URL]
Ilie, Cornelia
1998 “
The Ideological Remapping of Semantic Roles in Totalitarian Discourse, or, How to Paint White Roses Red.”
Discourse and Society 9 (1): 57–80.
Inkeles, Alex
1983 Exploring Individual Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Izvorski, Roumyana
1997 “
The Present Perfect as an Epistemic Modal.” In
Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 7, ed. by
Aaron Lawson, and
Enn Cho, 222–239. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.
Kostomarov, Vitalij Grigorjevich
1994 Jazykovoj Vkus Epokhi: iz Nabljudenij nad Rechevoj Praktikoj Mass Media [
Linguistic Taste of the Time]. Moscow: Pedagogika-Press.
Kronja, Ivana
2008 “
The Man of Transition in Mass Media Society: Case Serbia.”
Filozofska Istrazivanja 28 (1): 97–106.
Kulkarni, Subodh, Tim Hudson, Nagarajan Ramamoorthy, Angel Marchev, Petia Georgieva-Kondarkova, and Vladimir Gorskov
2010 “
Dimensions of Individualism-collectivism: A Comparative Study of Five Cultures.”
Business and Law 51: 93–109.
Labov, William
1972 Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Manoliu-Manea, Maria
1989 “
Metamorphoses of Time in Romanian Political Discourse.”
Journal of the American Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences 121: 63–75.
Marková, Ivana
1997 “
The Individual and the Community: A Post-communist Perspective.”
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 71: 3–17.
Matheson, Donald
2005 Media Discourses: Analyzing Media Texts. Berkshire & New York: Open University Press.
Nikolchev, Ivan
1997 “
Polarization and Diversification in the Bulgarian Press.” In
Post-communism and the Media in Eastern Europe, ed. by
Patrick H. O’Neil, 124–142. London: Frank Cass.
Ognianova, Ekaterina
1997 The Transitional Media System of Post-communist Bulgaria [
Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs 162]. Columbia, SC: Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Orwell, George
1949/1961 Nineteen Eighty Four. New York: Signet Classic.
Øvrelid, Lilja
2004 “
Disambiguation of Syntactic Functions in Norwegian: Modeling Variation in Word Order Conditioned by Animacy and Definiteness.” In
Proceedings of the 20th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, ed. by
Fred Karlsson, 1–17. Helsinki: University of Helsinki Publications.
Patterson, Thomas
1998 “
Time and News: The Media’s Limitations and an Instrument of Democracy.”
International Political Science Review 19 (1): 55–67.
Perlmutter, David
1978 “
Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis.” In
Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. by
Jeri J. Jaeger,
Anthony C. Woodbury,
Farrell Ackerman,
Christine Chiarello,
Orin D. Gensler,
John Kingston,
Eve Sweetser,
Henry Thompson, and
Kenneth W. Whistler, 157–189. University of California, Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Polyarush, Viktoriya
2010 The Influence of English on Ukrainian, with a Focus on the Language of the Youth. MA thesis. Ankara: Middle East Technical University.
Preoteasa, Isabela
2002 “
Intellectuals and the Public Sphere in Post-communist Romania: A Discourse Analytical Perspective.”
Discourse and Society 13 (2): 269–292.
Primus, Beatrice
1999 Cases and Thematic Roles. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Raychev, Andrei
2000a Privileged Perspectives 2000 Sofia: R and S.
Raychev, Andrei
2000b Sofia University lecture notes.
Raycheva, Lilia
2003 Mass Media in Bulgaria: A Source Book. Working Papers in International Journalism. Dortmund: Entire.
Raycheva, Lilia, and Todor Petev
2000 “
The Transformations Processes in the Mass Media System in Bulgaria (1989-1999).”
The Global Network 131: 7–15.
Raycheva, Lilia, and Todor Petev
2003 “
Mass Media’s Changing Landscape in Bulgaria (1989-1999).” In
Business as Usual: Continuity and Change in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. by
David Paletz, and
Karol Jakubowicz, 73–109. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Reykowski, Janusz, and Zuzanna Smolenska
1993 “
Collectivism, Individualism and Interpretation of Social Change: Limitations of a Simplistic Model.”
Polish Psychological Bulletin 241: 89–107.
Riffe, Daniel, Stephen Lacy, and Frederick Fico
1998 Analyzing Media Messages: Using Quantitative Content Analysis in Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Routamaa, Vesa, Tiina Hautala, and Yukie Tsutzuki
2009 “
Values and Cultures in Integrating Business: A Comparison of Bulgaria, Finland and Japan.”
World Journal of Management 1 (1): 13–22.
Scatton, Ernest
1993 “
Bulgarian.” In
The Slavonic languages, ed. by
Bernard Comrie, and
Greville G. Corbett, 188–248. London and New York: Routledge.
Schlesinger, Philip
1995 The Post-Socialist Media: What Power the West? The Changing Media Landscape in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Aldershot: Avebury.
Simpson, Paul
1993 Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge.
Smirnova, Anastasia
2013 “
Evidentiality in Bulgarian: Temporality, Epistemic Modality, and Information Source.”
Journal of Semantics 30 (4): 479–532.
Smirnova, Anastasia, and Rumen Iliev
2014 “
Evidentiality in Language and Cognition: The View from Construal Level Theory.” In
Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. by
Paul Bello,
Marcello Guarini,
Marjorie McShane, and
Brian Scassellati, 2943–2948. Québec City, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.
Smith, Carlota
1991 The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.
Stubbs, Michael
1997 “
Whorf’s Children: Critical Comments on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).” In
Evolving Models of Language, ed. by
Ann Ryan, and
Alison Wray, 110–116. Clevedon, HO: Multilingual Matters.
Tilkov, Dimităr, Stijan Stojanov, and Konstantin Popov
(eds) 1983 Grammatika na Săvremennija Bălgarski Knižoven Ezik. [
The Grammar of Contemporary Literary Bulgarian Language]. Part 2: Morphology. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Timberlake, Alan
1975 “
Hierarchies in the Genitive of Negation.”
Slavic and East European Journal 191: 123–138.
Trew, Tony
1979 “
Theory and Ideology at Work.” In
Language and Control, ed. by
Roger Fowler,
Bob Hodge,
Gunther Kress, and
Tony Trew, 94–116. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Vakurov, Vladimir N., Nikolay N. Kokhtev, and Grigorij J. Solganik
1978 Stilistika Gazetnyx Zhanrov [
The Stlylistics of Media Genre]. Moscow: Vysšaja škola.
van Dijk, Teun A
1988 News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
van Dijk, Teun A
1991 Rascism and the Press. London: Routledge.
van Dijk, Teun A
1993 “
Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.”
Discourse and Society 41: 249–283.
van Dijk, Teun A
1995 “
Discourse Semantics and Ideology.”
Discourse and Society 61: 243–289.
van Dijk, Teun A
2008 Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Dijk, Teun A
2009 Society and Discourse: How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Leeuwen, Theo
1996 “
The Representation of Social Actors in Discourse.” In
Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by
Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, and
Malcolm Coulthard, 32–70. London: Routledge.
Van Valin, Robert D., and LaPolla, Randy J
1997 Syntax: Structure, Meaning, and Function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Veenhoven, Ruut
1999 “
Quality of Life in Individualistic Society.”
Social Indicators Research 481: 157–186.
Weiner, E. Judith, and William Labov
1983 “
Constraints on the Agentless Passive.”
Journal of Linguistics 191: 29–58.
Widdowson, Henry
1995 “
Discourse Analysis: A Critical View.”
Language and Literature 4 (3): 157–172.
Wodak, Ruth
1996 Disorders of Discourse. London: Longman.
Wodak, Ruth
(ed) 1997 Gender and Discourse. London: Sage.
Wodak, Ruth, and Paul Chilton
Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer
(eds) 2009 Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd ed.). London: Sage.
Yang, Kuo-Shu
1988 “
Will Societal Modernization Eventually Eliminate Cross-cultural Psychological Differences.” In
The Cross-cultural Challenge to Social Psychology, ed. by
Michael H. Bond, 67–85. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Zambova, Antonia
2001 Leksikalni Characteristiki na Ekspresivni Celi na Săvremennija Bălgarski Populjaren Pečat [Lexical Characteristics of Expressive Goals in Contemporary Popular Press in Bulgaria].
LiterNet.
[URL]
Cited by (1)
Cited by 1 other publications
Carne, Carmel, Marcelyn Oostendorp & Anne Baker
2024.
Ideological framing of sign languages and their users in the South African press.
Multilingua 0:0
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.