Expectations on the way in which the audience may react to the news strongly influence the journalists' decisions in the process of newsmaking. When journalists try to anticipate their audience uptake, they ground their inferences on issues of possible appropriateness. The way appropriateness is perceived and assessed triggers different editorial strategies, which journalists constantly enact and which are key for their final editorial choices. These strategies may crucially differ depending on the linguistic and cultural context. Our article is aimed at shedding light on the metapragmatic strategies and on the anticipatory inferences that journalists use concerning their audience demand in order to make specific newsmaking decisions. The corpus on which we conducted our analysis enables comparative and contrastive studies from a multilingual as well as a multimedia perspective, since data are gained from both TV-journalism and print-journalism in the three linguistic areas of Switzerland. Part of the corpus, collected during the Idée Suisse project, was collected at the Swiss public service television (SRG SSR) in French and German. A more recent dataset was collected at Corriere del Ticino (CdT), the main Italian-language newspaper in the country, within the project "Argumentation in newsmaking process and product". Our research questions sound: are the journalists' metapragmatic strategies culture and/or language-dependent? In which linguistic/cultural region of Switzerland do we observe the strongest influence of these strategies? In order to provide reasonable insight into our research problems , we did both a linguistic and an argumentative analysis. In the linguistic analysis, we primarily focused on the metapragmatic strategies adopted by the journalists in order to express their standpoints. Their displays were specifically investigated in a contextualized, word by word micro-analysis in which we took the following dimensions into consideration: (1) linguistic dimensions, with a privileged focus on pragmatic, lexical, syntactic, stylistic and rhetorical aspects; (2) discursive dimensions, especially those dealing with metacommunicative, contextual, and co-textual communicative strategies; (3) psychological dimensions, evaluated mainly by means of Caffi & Janney (1994)'s emotive devices and of several markers of empathetic distance and proximity and mitigation proposed by Caffi (2001, 2007), and by those of linguistic aggravation proposed by Merlini-Barbaresi (2009). With the argumentative lens, we go one step further by having the possibility to explore the reasoning mechanisms which underlie the journalists' choices. W e analyzed the argumentative structures at the interactional level following Pragma-dialectics (Van Eemeren 2004), and at the inferential level, following a theory known as Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti & Rocci 2005). Preliminary results show that the interweaving of a micro and word-by word linguistic analysis fits well with the argumentative analysis and it enables to capture the multilingual and multicultural variety of these phenomena.
Metapragmatic strategies of journalists' newsmaking decisions on the basis of anticipated audience uptake: A multilingual and multimodal comparative study
Bonelli L;
2015
Abstract
Expectations on the way in which the audience may react to the news strongly influence the journalists' decisions in the process of newsmaking. When journalists try to anticipate their audience uptake, they ground their inferences on issues of possible appropriateness. The way appropriateness is perceived and assessed triggers different editorial strategies, which journalists constantly enact and which are key for their final editorial choices. These strategies may crucially differ depending on the linguistic and cultural context. Our article is aimed at shedding light on the metapragmatic strategies and on the anticipatory inferences that journalists use concerning their audience demand in order to make specific newsmaking decisions. The corpus on which we conducted our analysis enables comparative and contrastive studies from a multilingual as well as a multimedia perspective, since data are gained from both TV-journalism and print-journalism in the three linguistic areas of Switzerland. Part of the corpus, collected during the Idée Suisse project, was collected at the Swiss public service television (SRG SSR) in French and German. A more recent dataset was collected at Corriere del Ticino (CdT), the main Italian-language newspaper in the country, within the project "Argumentation in newsmaking process and product". Our research questions sound: are the journalists' metapragmatic strategies culture and/or language-dependent? In which linguistic/cultural region of Switzerland do we observe the strongest influence of these strategies? In order to provide reasonable insight into our research problems , we did both a linguistic and an argumentative analysis. In the linguistic analysis, we primarily focused on the metapragmatic strategies adopted by the journalists in order to express their standpoints. Their displays were specifically investigated in a contextualized, word by word micro-analysis in which we took the following dimensions into consideration: (1) linguistic dimensions, with a privileged focus on pragmatic, lexical, syntactic, stylistic and rhetorical aspects; (2) discursive dimensions, especially those dealing with metacommunicative, contextual, and co-textual communicative strategies; (3) psychological dimensions, evaluated mainly by means of Caffi & Janney (1994)'s emotive devices and of several markers of empathetic distance and proximity and mitigation proposed by Caffi (2001, 2007), and by those of linguistic aggravation proposed by Merlini-Barbaresi (2009). With the argumentative lens, we go one step further by having the possibility to explore the reasoning mechanisms which underlie the journalists' choices. W e analyzed the argumentative structures at the interactional level following Pragma-dialectics (Van Eemeren 2004), and at the inferential level, following a theory known as Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti & Rocci 2005). Preliminary results show that the interweaving of a micro and word-by word linguistic analysis fits well with the argumentative analysis and it enables to capture the multilingual and multicultural variety of these phenomena.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
