Analyzing the Media: A Systemic Functional Approach

Analyzing the Media offers original insights into media studies from a systemic functional linguistics perspective. It features papers from established scholars in the fields of systemic functional linguistics and multimodality as well as from young scholars who have already delivered remarkable contributions to these fields.

The opening chapters explore different functional approaches to analyzing journalistic genres (such as reports, editorials, letters to the editor and popular science features) with a clear emphasis on the examination of linguistic and semiotic textures. They are studied in terms of a range of aspects including generic, thematic and rhetorical structures, the distribution and function of pronouns and of and-parentheticals, engagement, projection and the packaging of voices, modality and authorial voice. Further chapters focus on the lexico-grammatical and functional changes that affect journalistic texts when they are translated for re-publication in a different news culture or adapted for use in the second language classroom. Other papers discuss how the new social media have led to new emerging linguistic practices as in internet forums, how specific multimodal textures, such as smell, can be co-deployed with other meaning-making resources (verbal, visual, spatial) to create specific effects for particular situations (such as in open-house viewing events) and how cultural historical activity theory, an action-oriented theory that does not integrate a model of social semiosis, can be fruitfully combined with SFL theory to explore hitherto unbeaten paths in human–computer interaction.

Analyzing the Media will be useful for students and scholars in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Multimodality as well as to scholars interested in the study of journalism.

Martin Kaltenbacher is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria. In his research, he applies methods of Systemic Functional Linguistics and corpus linguistics to media discourse, language of tourism and news commentary. He co-edited books on Multimodality (Ventola, E., Charles, C., Kaltenbacher, M. Perspectives on Multimodality, Benjamins) and on Discourse Studies (Gruber, H., Kaltenbacher, M., Muntigl, P. Empirical Approaches to Discourse Analysis, Peter Lang). For the past three years he has been collaborating on a corpus based, international project called Styles of Persuasion in Europe, the aim of which is to explore similarities and differences in newspaper commentary across more than 200 European newspapers from 13 different European countries. Hartmut Stockl is full professor of English and Applied Linguistics at Salzburg University. His main research areas are in semiotics, text linguistics/stylistics, pragmatics and multimodal/visual communication. A recurrent theme surfacing in most of his work is a concern with a functional-linguistic theory of the multimodal text and effective analytical methods for uncovering its structures and styles. He is particularly interested in the linkage of language and image in modern media, typography and an aesthetic appreciation of advertising. His latest (co-)edited volumes are Bildlinguistik (2011, Erich Schmidt), Medientheorien und Multimodalitat (2011, Herbert von Halem), and Werbung - Keine Kunst!? (2012, Winter). He is the co-editor of the Handbook Language in Multimodal Contexts (2016, de Gruyter) in the 21-volume series Sprachwissen.