Style, Mediation, and Change: Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Talking Media (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0190629495 ISBN 13: 9780190629496

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

When talk circulates through technological media - through television or radio and through the activities they support, like the dissemination of news, product advertising or entertainment - it takes on distinctive characteristics, functions and styles. The talking media have developed their own ways of styling individuals (often as celebrities of different types, but also as 'ordinary people'), and ways of styling relationships (such as constructing informality or trust or authority). Media also style their own ways of communicating (how to read the news, how to conduct interviews, how to entertain or educate others, and so on).

Media invest heavily in style and styling, drawing on semiotic modes well beyond speech itself. 'Style' therefore needs to be theorised carefully in sociolinguistics and neighbouring disciplines. Episodes and fragments of mediated styles commonly take on new lives when they are re-circulated via interactive 'new' media platforms. Style therefore points to both stability, where ways of speaking and ways of being have become culturally familiar, and to instability, in the talking media's persistent dynamic reworking of stylistic norms. This book explores a wide range of normative structures and creative media processes of this sort, in many different national contexts and in different languages.

The globalised world is already massively mediatised - what we know about language, people and society is necessarily shaped through our engagement with media. But talking media are caught up in wider currents of rapid change too. Creative innovations in media styling can heighten our reflexive awareness, but they can also unsettle our existing understandings of language-society relations. In reporting new investigations by expert researchers, situated in relation to relevant theory, the book gives an original and timely account of how style, media and change need to be integrated further to advance the discipline of sociolinguistics.

About this title

About the Author

Janus Mortensen is Associate Professor at the Center for Internationalization and Parallel Language Use (CIP) at the University of Copenhagen. He is a founding member of the Research Centre for Cultural and Linguistic practices in the International University (CALPIU, Roskilde University), and co-editor of Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, the journal of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen.

Nikolas Coupland is Emeritus Professor, Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, Wales and Honorary Professor, Department of Nordic Research, University of Copenhagen University, Denmark. He is an elected Fellow of both the UK Academy of Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was founding editor, with Allan Bell, of the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

Jacob Thøgersen is Associate Professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics the University of Copenhagen. He has previously held positions at the LANCHART Research Center (working on the LARM audio research archive), Center for Internationalization and Parallel Language Use (CIP), both University of Copenhagen, as well as the University of Iceland and the Danish Language Council.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190629495
• ISBN 13: 9780190629496
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Mortensen Janus