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Understanding Social and Linguistic Change

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The UK ‘at Risk’

Part of the book series: Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty ((CRSTRU))

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Abstract

This chapter develops the argument that language is a constitutive part of both the social realm and the production and dissemination of news coverage through the media. It provides an overview of available research on technological and linguistic changes in the print news media including the Wapping revolution, debates about media standards (tabloidization) and the influence of the Internet and social media. It outlines historical dynamics in language such as densification, democratisation, informalisation and grammaticalisation and distinguishes long-term, middle-term and short-term changes. The complex forces at work in the media and beyond are the backdrop against which the detailed historical analysis of the book utilises linguistic theories (frame semantics) and corpus linguistic research tools (concordances, collocations).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Times 440,558 copies, Financial Times 189,579 copies and The Guardian 152,714 copies all in January 2018, Press Gazette 15 February 2018, Audit Bureau of Circulations (accessed 13 August 2018 at https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/national-newspaper-print-abcs-daily-star-overtakes-daily-telegraph-for-first-time-in-over-a-year/).

  2. 2.

    Broadsheet was originally the paper format for quality newspapers while tabloid format was used by the yellow press or tabloid press. However, this distinction has become blurry with quality press reducing their paper size.

  3. 3.

    Subjectification is a semasiological process in which linguistic meanings tend to become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state/attitude towards the proposition. Subjectification occurs in conversation (through speech acts and has rhetorical aims) and thus implies some degree of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectification does so more blatantly through its “development of meanings that explicitly reveal incipient design: the designing of utterances for an intended audience … at the discourse level”.

  4. 4.

    Indeed, socio-linguistics has examined how language is instantiated in different contexts and how a text can identify the context of its usage. A lecture as the context of the production of a text can be identified by language choices. The social milieu one is grown up in might also shape the person’s choice of language. But these kinds of analyses in socio-linguistics do not address questions of how changing social conditions shape and reshape the meaning of words more generally or how meaning from one context travels to another.

  5. 5.

    The text which occurs together with or close to other text.

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  1. School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Jens O. Zinn

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Zinn, J.O. (2020). Understanding Social and Linguistic Change. In: The UK ‘at Risk’. Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20238-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20238-5_2

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