Ideological transformation of discourse; or how the Sunday Times got its message across
1978; Elsevier BV; Volume: 2; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/0378-2166(78)90014-0
ISSN1879-1387
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic Variation and Morphology
ResumoThe paper demonstrates how linguistic theory can be used as a means of reliably grasping the ideological characteristics of discourse. Recent developments in linguistics have shown that many aspects of discourse are ideologically significant, and not only what is usually isolated as ‘content’. This is most easily seen in transformations of texts of the kinds that occur in paraphrase, rewriting, summary, translation and so on. The many syntactic transformations that occur are related in an organized way. The existence of ideologically distinct options in each syntactic transformation and in the overall structure of such changes makes the occurence of specific structures ideologically significant - and it means that a complete description of the structured set of syntactic transformations reveals the ideological determination of the transformation of the text. This is demonstrated with a detailed analysis of the way in which a journalist rewrote a letter from the British Leyland Personnel Department. The ideologies expressed in the letters are shown to be ones familiar in Industrial Relations Theory. A final section very briefly indicates the wider applications of the concept of ideological transformations of discourse in historical and sociological studies and in the study of the media.
Referência(s)