Notes on Fairclough

I'm so lost with the Fairclough bit that I'm typing up my notes on it:

-Theme: power of mass media
framework for analysing media language, important element in social/cultural change
"public affairs media" news, documentary, politics, social affairs, science, etc.

Example 1.
Authoritativeness: categorical statements, reporter projected as figure of authority, who knows and has right to tell (image)
Media artist entertaining consumer, rhetorical attention-grabbing features
Representation: include/exclude, foreground/background
What are they getting at? sensationalistic, sense of alarm

1. How is the world represented?
2. What identities are set up? (reporter, audience, third parties)
3. What relationships are set up?

Example 2. (6-7)
words and filmed reconstruction, borderline info/entertainment, fact/fiction
images primacy over words (see before hear description)
apparent inconsistencies, responsibility mitigated in text (event clauses separated by background explanatory clauses)

Example 3. (8-9) complex images, music, sound, superimosed; unusual, more entertaining than not; no specialist vocab
tension between public and private (science technology part of public life, broadcasts consumed in home)

Example 4 (9-10) conversationalization, presenter an "ordinary bloke", colloquial vocab

Tensions: information/entertainment
public/private
tendencies: conversationalization increase (relationship to ordinary life)
marketization increase --- pressure to entertain to survive commercially (relationship to business/commerce)

Media ideology (p12 and following). "Ideologies are propositions that generally figure as implicit assumptions in texts, which contribute to producing or reproducing unequal relations of power" (14) -- text a good thing to analyze, "tensions and contradicitons manifest in the heterogeneity of teual meanings and forms" (15)

do conversationalized discourse practices manifest shift in power relationships in favor of ordinary ppl? (no) strategy recruit as audience and manipulate
*but no can't be dismissed as ideological (science, democratizing technology)

Language analysis "can help anchor social and cultural research and analysis in a detailed understanding of the nature of media output" 16
analyze as discourse
-discourse practices: "the ways in which texts are produced by media workers in media institutions, and the ways in which tests are received by audiences, as well as how media tests are socially distributed" 16 [situational, institutional, societal levels]
-sociocultural practices
discourse anallysis can be understood as "an attempt to show systematic links between texts, discourse practices, and sociocultural practices" 17
text "both spoken and written language"
-multifunctional/systemic view: ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions (halliday)
ideational "generating representations of world"
interpersonal "relations and identities"

Representations: bias, manipulation, and ideology, but identities and relations receive less attn
Texts as options, forms, choices of meaning, how to relate, what identities, etc.
discourse=both social interaction (interpersonal) and "social construction of reality" (ideational)

Ch 6 media texts "constitute versions of reality in ways which depend on the social positions and interests and objectives of those who produce them" -- through choices!!!
1. how events and relationships and situations are represented -- clauses/propositions
2. combination and sequencing of propositions
-local coherence relations
-coherence relations among complexes of clauses
-forms of argumentation
-global text structure (genre)

Presupposition -- "scale of presence" Absent_Presupposed___Backgrounded___Foregrounded
Assume there exist common ground texts, in which what is presupposed is explicitly present
Positioning the audience
"us"
particular importance in ideological analysis, ideologies typically embedded in implicit meaning of text (what we said about reading stuff from other political parties)
Clauses: wording, choice of conjunctions, connotations; emphasis on what's at the end of a sentence
In any Event, Patients (acted on)/Actors (do the acting)
"Nominalizations" processes that have been turned into noun-like terms which can themselves funtion as participants in other processes p112
Van Leeuwen 8 primary elements of a social practice: participants, activities, circumstances, tools/dress, eligibility criteria, performance indicators, and reactions of participants to one another p115

participant element, defining collectively/individually, by function, status or location, temporally, etc.

sequencing: main clauses foreground info, subordinate backgound it; ways of linking; create form and closure (120)

conjunctions: addition, contrastive, variations...
Halliday and Hasan 4 types of cohesion: conjunction, lexical cohesion, reference, and ellipsis