Fowler and His Colleagues

Inspired by Halliday’s (1978) systemic-functional grammar, which asserts that language is as it is because of its functions in the social structure, Fowler and his colleagues at the University of East Angelia tried to read off social structures by critically analyzing linguistic structures (Fowler 1991, Fowler et al. 1979, Kress and Hodge 1979). Language use is not arbitrary for options are available and ‘each particular form of linguistic expression in a text—wording, syntactic option, etc.—has its reason’ (Fowler 1991:4). For example, any social disturbance can be termed as either a ‘demonstration’ or a ‘riot’; the former suggests people’s exercising their right, while the latter condemns their behavior. Ideologies exist in every discourse, and

news is no exception.

To unveil the hidden ideologies of news, Fowler and his colleagues adopted analytic tools in Halliday’s discussion of the language functions¹, and developed critical linguistics, in which lexical choices used in news media, such as referring expressions and their collocated predicates, and syntactic patterns, including transitivity and transformation processes, are under critical examination.

Vocabulary of a language, to critical linguists, is in the form of a taxonomic map instead of a list, which sorts boundless concepts into strictly defined categorial relationships and helps language users stabilize and converse about their life experiences. The categorization of vocabulary is, hence, of significant ideological importance. The words chosen in the press reflect not only how an event is perceived by journalists, but how the audience is directed and expected to construct the event in the same way.

Referring expressions in news categorize people and events into groups, and place discriminatory values on them. For example, any social unrest can be either a

‘demonstration’ or a ‘riot’, as has been mentioned above, and a suicide bomber is likely to be portrayed as a ‘terrorist’ by western media, but a ‘freedom fighter’ by Jihad supporters. All the expressions used in news, in other discourses as well, are not a random selection but embody categorial and ideological function (Caldas-Coulthard 1993, Fang 1994, 2001, Flowerdew et al. 2002, Kuo 2001, Kuo and Nakamura 2005, Teo 2000, Wang 1993).

The significance of referring expressions cannot be ignored, and so is that of their accompanying predicates (Flowerdew et al. 2002, Kuo 2001). In Flowerdew et al.

1 Halliday (1978) proposed three meta-functions of language: ideational, interpersonal and textual. The ideational function allows people to represent their experiences of the world and their beliefs in language. The interpersonal function helps construct social identities and social relationships between people. Last, the textual function relates to how a text is constructed out of sentences.

(2002), it was found that Hong Kong’s leading English newspaper, the South China Morning Post, habitually ascribed negative attributes to Mainland immigrants—poor, unemployable, uneducated, unhygienic, to name a few. These predicates clearly unfolded the newspaper’s hostility toward Mainland immigrants.

At the sentence level, critical linguists focus on transitivity and relevant transformations. The concepts of transitivity and transformation employed in critical linguistics differ from the sense of the terms in Chomsky’s generative grammar, but conform to Hallidayan grammar.

The transitivity system of language, according to Halliday (1985), is the foundation of representation, for it construes the world of experience into a manageable set of process types. Each experience can be represented by clauses with processes, participants, and circumstances, mainly who does what to whom in when and where. The processes involved and the roles participants take allow journalists to encode the institutional ideologies into news texts (Fang 1994, 2001, Teo 2000).

Trew (1979a) studied transitivity used by two British newspapers, The Times and the Guardian, in a series of 1975-Salisbury-riot reports, with the first day headlines as followed.

(1) a. Rioting blacks shot dead by police as ANC leaders meets

(The Times, June 2, 1975) b. Police shoot 11 dead in Salisbury riot

(Guardian, June 2, 1975) The content is similar in these two cases, but the processes and the participants presented are distinct. The Guardian headline is in the active form, and The Times one is in the passive. The Guardian stance was less detectable, but with ‘rioting blacks’ in the focal position instead of ‘police’, The Times suggested that ‘blacks’ be responsible for the shooting, and thus legitimize police’s killing. The Times position was

reinforced by its characterization of the dead as ‘blacks’, whose information was unspecified in the Guardian. Also while ‘riot’ is the circumstance in which the tragedy occurred in the Guardian, ‘rioting’ is the quality of the dead in The Times. This examination of transitivity was shown to help unravel ideological positions the newspapers held.

Transformation processes related to transitivity—mainly passivization and nominalization—are also under examination (Fang 1994, Kuo and Nakamura 2005).

Passivization is a process of demoting the agent, and simultaneously promoting the patient. The patient is put in the focal position, but the agent is marginalized or omitted. This transformed presentation may be an accommodation of textual coherence or an indication of a specific interpretation, just like The Time headline above, in which the journalist’s interpretation that the responsibility was on the shot instead of the shooter was signaled by the employment of the passive construction.

The other transformation process is nominalization, which is a radical transformation of a clause into a nominal. For example, a complete proposition ‘X has alleged against Y that Y did A and that Y did B [etc.]’ may be trimmed into a nominal

‘allegation’, with participants and indication of time and modality deleted. Thus, the nominalization process is potentially mystification, which permits concealment.

The critical linguistics approach, which explores lexical choices and syntactic patterns of text, as well as modality and speech acts, to disclose the connection between linguistic and ideological processes in news, has proven to be fruitful and, what’s more, it has laid a sound foundation for future theory building. In the following sections, we will see respectively how Fairclough and van Dijk expanded the critical linguistics approach into critical discourse analysis.

2.2.1.2 Fairclough

The previous section has demonstrated how Fowler and his colleagues demystify readings of ideology-laden texts with critical linguistics. However, for Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995), it is impossible to read off social structures simply from linguistic structures. Instead only in the domain of interpretation, that is, in the way how the audience interprets a text, can social meanings and ideologies be fully explored and discussed. Fowler (1996) himself also acknowledged that ‘the original (critical linguistic) theory … privileges the source of texts, ascribing little power to the reader because the reader simply is not theorized’ (p. 6&7).

There is no one-to-one correspondence between a text and its interpretation, for texts are open to interpretations dependent on contexts and interpreters. Each interpreter, as a social member, processes each text based on his position and resources he acquires in the society, and thus arrives at his own specific interpretation.

The analysis of text alone is inadequate for an ideological study. The concepts of discourse, i.e. text with context, and society are needed if a more consolidated theory on language and ideology is to be advanced.

With respect to the interface between language and society, critical linguists center on how language, as a social practice, reproduces existing ideologies and social values in a unidirectional way, whereas Fairclough takes the position that language is both socially shaped and socially shaping. That is, language can not only reproduce and thus help maintain social norms and conventions, but challenge and further transform social values and beliefs when used creatively.

In Fairclough’s conception, critical studies should not be delimited at the textual level, but extended to the discourse level; it should not be pursued purely in the linguistic domain, but rather within a social perspective. He is the key figure to transit studies on language and ideology form text analysis to discourse analysis and a

precursor in the critical discourse analysis framework, in which he proposed a three-dimensional framework to analyze a discourse as text, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice.

Figure 2-1. A framework for critical discourse analysis of a communicative event (Fairclough 1995:59)

Text, the product of discourse practice, may be written (newspaper), spoken (broadcast), or spoken with visual (TV news). It is analyzed under four headings:

vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, and text structure. Vocabulary and grammar deal with individual words and how they are combined into clauses and sentences. Cohesion manages the linkage between clauses and sentences (Halliday and Hasan 1976, Halliday 1985) and text structure organizes the global structure of the whole text.

Discourse practice is on how a text is produced and consumed. As we have pointed out earlier that news organizations are not self-contained bodies but social institutions, news production is always conditioned by other factors of society, and involves complex institutional routines of a collective nature. In consumption, social member is at the premium in the sense that a text will not mean anything or carry any

SOCIOCULTURAL PRACTICE

text production

text consumption DISCOURSE PRACTICE

TEXT

ideological significance until it is interpreted by a social member.

Both processes of production and consumption are constrained by sociocultural practice. They are constrained by members’ available resources, which are internalized in social structures, and by the nature of specific communicative events involved.

In the discourse practice dimension, three aspects of analysis are brought up: the force of utterances, the coherence of texts, and the intertextuality of texts. The forces of utterances, i.e. speech acts, are actual components of any communicative event (Searle 1969). A coherent text requires that constituents of a text be meaningfully connected so that the text as a whole conveys an intelligible idea. Intertextuality, coping with the interdependence among discourses (Foucault 1972), looks at traces of discourse practice in the target discourse, and strives to interpret social and cultural meanings hidden beneath. News reports, which represent and transform utterances and happenings of other discourses, are thus always intertextual (Waugh 1995).

In illustration of intertextuality, Fairclough (1992) studied how a committee report on drug trafficking was transformed into a news report in a British tabloid, the Sun. In the news report, it was found that the informal, colloquial language of private life was used to win readership, and meanwhile part of official discourse remained to preserve the legitimacy and authority of the report. The heterogeneity of the language revealed the newspaper’s contradictory positions and identities.

Sociocultural practice is the last dimension, in which ideologies and power negotiation has a material existence in practices. Ideologies built into conventions are more or less naturalized, and most of the people through their whole lives are never aware of the fact that their automatic practices contain ideological functions. However, what Fairclough wants to emphasize is that people’s practices, on the other hand, are socially constitutive, that is, they possess the potential to either reproduce or

restructure social norms. Social struggles can be undertaken and social changes can be achieved through creation and negotiation of discourse practices.

To sum up, for Fairclough, text is what is there to be described, but society is what is there to be explained. As for discourse, it functions as a mediator between text and society in the sense that ‘properties of sociocultural practice shape texts, but by way of shaping the nature of the discourse practice, i.e. the ways in which texts are produced and consumed, which is realized in features of texts’ (Fairclough 1995:60).

The three dimensions, though focusing on separate facets of a discourse, are indispensable for a more holistic critical discourse analysis framework.