«Textual Architecture of a Selected Hard News in English: A Discourse Analysis Approach»

Suadad Fadhil Kadhum
«Textual Architecture of a Selected Hard News in English: A Discourse Analysis Approach»
Arab World English Journal (AWEJ), vol. 8, n.º 1 (2017)

Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) | Arab Society of English Language Studies (ASELS) | Kuala Lumpur | MALAYSIA


Extracto de páginas 281-283 y 291 de la publicación en PDF. Véanse las referencias en la publicación original del texto.

«Introduction

»The term discourse has gained a clear interest in a variety of disciplines including philosophy, linguistics, sociology, communication, etc. Media have become the prominent factor of life especially the written formwhich is one of the most important components of the information revolution as it is a means of communicating information, to influence and persuade the readers.

»It influences the social and political beliefs of most people. Accordingly, most of people's social and political knowledge and beliefs about the world arederived from the dozens of news reports they read every day. In addition to everyday conversation, there is no other discursive practice, which is engaged in many people as news in the press.

»Furthermore, as readers of news, people assume that news consists of faithful reports of events that happened out there in the world, especially in the case when they are non-native speakers of a language as they are unaware of the complexities that underlie news stories as far as textual structure is concerned.

»The center of the news is the text. The content of the news is not independent of its expression, and one can hope to have a clear understanding of the nature news stories by a close analysis of the important markers that assist in accomplishing a coherent and cohesive text.

»Discourse is not an amorphous mass. It has both structural and conceptual patterns. Nevertheless, discourse patterns are not rule-bound as in lower level grammar, but are more flexible, reflecting underlying conceptual patterns more directly. In particular, a news story has its structure. It aims at stating its facts quickly and clearly. Thus, the purpose of a proper discourse structure is to allow the reader move through the story easily and make him able to realize the relationship between the various pieces of information that the reporter has gathered.

»This study covers the macro level analysis of a chosen hard news. It is adopted mainly to show the reader how difficult and a complex process is writing a hard news, in addition, such analysis helps better understanding news stories.

»Hard News

»Hard news stories are considered records of events that have just happened such as violations, fires, court statement, speeches, protest rallies, acts of war, traffic accidents and elections. Hard news stories confirm facts and not opinion or analysis. The emphasis should be on the absolute known facts. Hard news is an account of what has happened, why it happened, who was affected.

»Thus, Hard news requires unique textual structure. Textual structure is concerned with constituent parts of a text and how they fit together to form textual whole. One of the important issues in discourse analysis is the organization of discourse analysis; Hence, the term organization refers to the sum of relations which hold between the units of a text.

»Halliday and Hassan (1976:8) argue that a group of sentences is said to constitute a text or not depending on the cohesive relationships within and between the sentences that create texture. The cohesive relations that are set up within a text provide texture. Texture is the basis for unity and semantic interdependence within discourse and a text without texture would be just group of unrelated sentences. Thus, cohesionis considered the standard of textuality that concerns with the way the components of the surface text are connecting within a sequence.

»Discourse

»The term “discourse” is derived from Latin “discursus” which refers to “conversation, speech.” Harris (1951) states that discourse is a structure that can be dealt with analogy of the sentence. Crystal (2010) confirms that discourse refers to a continuous stretch of language that it is larger than a sentence and that constitutes a coherent unit such as narrative, conversation, ceremony, joke…etc.

»Carter and Nash (1990) state that discourse refers to different levels of a language used in the organization of a text. They mention five levels of language: phonology; vocabulary; grammar; discourse and context. Fairclough (1995) mentions that discourse is a field of both ideological processes and linguistic processes and he adds that there is an obvious relationship between these two processes in that the linguistic choices that are used to form texts can carry ideological meaning. According to him (Fairclough, 1995), discourse refers to the social action and interaction as well as to the social construction of reality. Baker and Ellece (2011) describe discourse as a term with several related and often quite loose meanings while Crystal (2007) states that discourse refers to a continuous stretch of languages larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a conversation, a sermon, an argument, a joke or narrative.

»Text

»A text is a piece of language in use (Halliday and Hassan, 1976). The term text is highly connected with discourse; that is why some linguists use these two terms as synonyms. Harris (1951) does not show any distinction between these two terms and he says that both of them are used to refer to the language that an author uses. Likewise, (Finch, 2005) notices that linguists who use the term discourse, they also use the term text to talk about spoken and written texts.

»However, Coulthard (1985) makes a comparison between text and discourse. He states that the term discourse refers to the spoken mode of language and consists of utterances while text refers to the written mode of language and made up of sentences. On the other side, Van Dijk (1977) believes that texts are the theoretical construct that underlies discourse. Halliday (1976) states that linguistically, a text refers to a spoken as well as a written unified whole passage. He adds that text should be both coherent and cohesive. Thus, a text is not a grammatical unit but it is a semantic unit of language in use. In 1999, Halliday clarifies that a text is the reflection of a form of talking, listening, writing, or reading. In such case, a text is the product of discourse, which in turns, reflects the communicative process. Lyons (1976:30) uses the term text to denote any connected passage of discourse.

»Textual Architecture

»The term textual architecture is used in this study in order to refer to the textual structure of the chosen hard news. It includes thematic macrostructures, schematic superstructures, narrative structures and grammatical as well as lexical cohesion.

»News Stories

»Fowler (1991) states that news is the representation of the world in the languages. He adds that it is a linguistic and an ideological construct that reflects both the linguistic as well as the critical dimensions used in the current investigation. The word “story” is attached to news because every news article denotes an event. Turbow (2009) mentions that news story is a tale that has a beginning, middle and an end. He adds that news story can be divided into four types: “hard news”; “investigative reports”; “ editorials” and “ soft news.” This paper is concerned with what is called “hard news” which covers the news stories of battle, fire, crime, and politics.

»Such news should be presented in an objective way, and no personal viewpoint must be inserted. News stories should have their own structures. Aitchison(1999) states the news stories have complex underlying structures where new information is presented through giving an answer to “what”; “when,” “who,” “how,” “why” questions. In most cases, no answer can be seen for” when” and “why” question” because the event must be very recent one that is why there is no need to answer such question and for “why” question, the cause of most event cannot be known immediately.

»What makes the news story interesting, Bell (1998) clarifies, is the way that the journalist uses to present the events, times, places and news actors. Bell (1991) mentions that”the values of news drive the way in which news is presented (155)” and these values reflects the ideology of society. Hence, news values refer to the criteria set by journalists to measure which news story is worthy for printing.

»More recently, Montgomery (2011) states that news deals with the most recent events of a public scale and importance. Its focus is always negative, concerning war, famine, accident and disaster.

»Conclusion

»It has been noticed that the chosen news story has a very complex discourse structure and that the analysis of English news stories in terms of macrostructures, superstructures, narrative structures and cohesion is relevant in giving an account of it in which deletion macrorule is considered the most important category in the formulation of different levels of macrostructure.

»The main topic of the news story is manifested through applying macrorules. The schema categories do not have fixed order. They are highly recurrent in news discourse. Headline represents the highest level of the macrostructure. Headline, lead, and main events are obligatory in writing news stories. Lead has two functions: it summarizes and introduces the main events.

»The writer of the news presents an intelligent headline and lead in which he gives the core of the story leaving some of the information to be clarified throughout the article to make the readers eager to read the whole news article. In addition, the writer displays the consequences of the events in such a way that make the news have a social and political impact on the readers. Such consequences can have a clear impact on the reader. The writer of this news story aims at not only conveying information but arising the voice of protest against the government and the court of justice. The background information, in which the writer presents two cases: the former sailor's case and Hilary Clinton's, is cleverly wovento reach the earlier mentioned aim.

»In spite of the fact that comment is an optional discourse category, conclusion and reaction which are subcategories of comment are manifested clearly through giving an evaluated result to the event supports the writer's aim. This finding does reflect an opinion which is objective and can be realized by the majority of readers. The narrative structure of this news story is very complex.

»Highly specific types of cohesive devices are manifested in news discourse like repetition and synonymy as lexical cohesion and reference and conjunctions as grammatical cohesion.»