RI Language and the Media 2023

Introduction to the Media Unit Media Analysis: Connotations and Denotations The everyday reader of the newspapers, pressed for time, may not necessarily pay attention to the type of language used in the news articles. That is, she may not particularly heed the choice of words (diction) or the tone in which a story was reported. This seems reasonable if the reader is in a hurry to just get the gist of things, or a quick information update. After all, language is merely a tool, a medium if you like, with which ideas and knowledge are communicated. Or is it? In this exercise, you’ll decide. Each pair of words below has similar denotations (neutral meanings) but rather different connotations (coloured meanings). In the first blank column, write down one definition which could objectively apply to both words. In the second column, write down the different associations that each word possesses. WORD COMMON DENOTATION DIFFERENT CONNOTATIONS 1 kill massacre 2 house home 3 emotional passionate 4 sweat perspire 5 die pass away 6 pale fair 7 naive innocent 8 nosy inquisitive 9 animal beast 10 liberal permissive 11 thin skinny 12 puny delicate 13 single spinster 14 mislead deceive 15 lie misstatement 16 data

information 17 portly fat Emotive Conjugations Another way to think about the values imposed upon us by language is to think in terms of ‘emotive conjugations.’ This is a term many today associate with philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). A conjugation is a verb that has been inflected (or changed in form) to fit the context. An emotive conjugation refers to the practice of changing words (or choosing them), either consciously or unconsciously, so that we pitch a sentence in a way that benefits us, or in a way that will have the readers view us in a favorable light. In other words, when we conjugate words emotively, we find words whose factual content (denotation) is the same as its synonyms but whose connotations are entirely different. The following examples will clarify: What is being described (neutral) Word choice when applied to ‘Us’ (objective meaning) Word choice when applied to ‘Them’ (subjective meaning) Arriving at a new decision I have reconsidered You have changed your mind They have gone back on their word. Holding one’s position We are firm You are obstinate They are pig-headed Intelligence activities We are conducting research / surveillance They are spying Let us consider the examples: "We are firm", "You are obstinate", and "He is pig-headed". "Firm" here is an instance of what linguists regard as ameliorative (positive) connotation, "obstinate" and "pig-headed" as pejorative (negative) in increasing degree. Yet these three sentences could refer to the identical situation. What this suggests, in the end, is that language has great emotive power. Depending on our word choice (diction), we can choose to evoke positive or negative emotions to varying degrees, and in so doing, shape people’s response to what we are saying. Language is thus not a transparent carrier of content, but is itself laden with messages which we intentionally or unintentionally send out to our audience. These messages will in turn shape what they know.

The article below provides a first-hand example of the linguistic determinism as proposed by Sapir and Whorf. In this case, we see how the Japanese language can influence and determine thought. Reading: The Interplay of Language, Culture, and Thought by Eileen Dombrowski. Inscrutable, evasive, insincere. Saying 'yes' when they really mean 'no', and smiling politely all the while. The image of the Japanese in the west is often of an incomprehensible culture, whose smooth and polished surface cannot be penetrated. It is perhaps through examining the Japanese language, though, that English speakers might gain a glimpse into the culture, as the language and culture are so reciprocally interconnected. The Japanese language shows some of the substance behind the polished surface, as it reveals a culture of politeness, of respectful treatment of others, and of highly tuned social awareness. In Japanese, one can scarcely speak to another person, and certainly not correctly, without a highly developed sensitivity to relative social position, based on a fusion of factors such as age, gender, or importance in a company. The language provides different levels of politeness, so that the speaker must recognize whether to speak 'up' to a superior, 'level' to an equal - though never 'down' to an inferior! “We can't say exactly what form for what occasion,” writes Miss Tanaka, “but we have to use our sensitivity.” This sense of relative position permeates the forms of the language. 'If I want to say something very polite: comments Junko Sagara, 'I have three ways. One is to put the verb or sentence in the polite form. The second is to use the verb which is used only for a respected person for the action of the person I am talking to. The third is to put the verb which shows my own action into the modest form.' To complicate matters, modesty and humility are so much part of speech that one would refer indirectly to one's own group one's family, for example - using a humble form which pushes them downward, and to the group of the person to whom one is speaking in an honorific form, raising them upward in comparison, in order to be respectful toward the other person. The words for ‘I’ and 'you' likewise vary according to the relationship between people, to the point that Japanese students in an English-speaking college describe responding quite differently toward bilingual teachers depending on whether they are speaking with them in English or Japanese. Izumi Sasaki describes her feeling that English gives her different possibilities from Japanese in forming relationships with families where she was a guest: I would like to give an example from my experience here. When I was in Japan, I went to stay at my friend's house for the weekend. Of course, I was talking to my friend using the informal form of 'you', and I was using polite forms (for which the exact translation in English does not exist, as far as I know) for her parents and her grandparents. Although I had known all those people for quite a long time, I never got to talk to her parents and her grandparents about their private life as I do to her, because those polite forms that I was using would not go together with those questions that I wanted to ask them about their private life. I would never ask those questions in those polite forms unless I was their lawyer or something like that. If I actually did ask them, I might have been considered as being such a nagging teenage girl. Therefore, I never got to know how her parents met each other, or even about their childhood or adolescence at all. No matter how close the friend might have been to me, the relationship with her family was always like this. But when I stayed at my host's family's place for the first time in Canada, the condition was totally different. First of all the feeling that I had when I was asking them on the phone if I could stay or not, was the one that I had never experienced when I was talking to someone who I had met (or talked to) for the first time. Although we were talking to each other without even knowing the other person's face, we were talking to each other in such a way that people who overheard our conversation might have thought that I was talking to my friend. Actually, I myself couldn't believe that I was talking to my host family rather than my friend. It seems to me that this was because we were both using the same word 'you'. Male and female speech also varies, with ‘I’ and 'you' in different forms and particular endings added to other words. The possibility fo