Abstract
Controversy is a term that journalists (and others) use in their texts and discourse, a feature of language in use. In news discourse it is routinely used as an event category, a way of naming and categorizing the events that journalists report. Journalists narrate controversies using event categories that appear as part of natural phenomenon, historical event, and pragmatic event formulas. They index events through a wide range of selectivity and individuation. The first formula contributes to our experience of controversies as forces of nature, autopoietic processes that develop beyond human agency, decision making, and control. The second and third contribute to our experience of controversies as relatively discrete historical and discursive phenomena, with the third regularly depicting individual human agents as interlocutors. These three formulas not only contribute to narratives of public controversies but also to the shape of the news article as a genre.
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Notes
- 1.
The terms “foregrounding” and “backgrounding” refer to the degree of salience a particular element of a narrated event will be given depending on the particular kind of utterance used in narrating it. Some posit a kind of “saliency hierarchy” involved in discourse (Fillmore 1977, p. 78). Foregrounded elements will be those that have higher salience in the discourse. Features of high transitivity are associated with high salience, and therefore with foregrounding (Hopper and Thompson 1980, p. 283). These terms can be traced to Prague School linguists (cf. for example Havranek 1932, pp. 9–10; Mukarovsky 1932, p. 29).
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Cramer, P.A. (2011). Controversy as an Event Category. In: Controversy as News Discourse. Argumentation Library, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1288-1_4
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