Daniela Landert

Personalisation in Mass Media Communication. British online news between public and private

It seems to be a truism that today’s news media present the news in a more personal and direct way than print newspapers some twenty-five years ago. However, it is far from obvious, how this can be described linguistically. This study develops a model that integrates and differentiates between the various facets of personalisation from a linguistic point of view. It includes 1) contexts that involve the audience by inviting direct interaction and through the use of visual elements; 2) the focus on private individuals who are personally affected by news events; and 3) the use of communicative immediacy, for instance in the form of direct speech and first and second person pronouns. This model is applied to data from five British online news sites, demonstrating how individual features contribute to personalisation, how different features interact, and what personalisation strategies are used by news sites of different market orientations.

16. Stance in fiction

This chapter deals with stance as the expression of evaluative, epistemic and affective attitudes. Stance is a multifaceted concept and it is used in different ways across different research traditions. In fiction, stance can be realised both in character speech and in narratorial voice, and it can be expressed verbally as well as through non-verbal means, such as gestures and facial expressions. Studying stance can provide insights into characterisation, the dynamics between characters, plot development and narrative perspective. The chapter provides an overview of the different ways in which stance is relevant for the study of fiction from a pragmatic perspective, and it points to the great potential of future research in this area.

Participation as user involvement

The aim of this chapter is to explore the potential of social media for user participation from different perspectives. This includes technical factors that determine how much participation is possible on a given platform as well as the degree and forms of participation that can actually be observed. The chapter also addresses the relation between user involvement that results from interaction and other involvement strategies that can be found on social media, such as the presence of personal content and language of immediacy. It concludes with a case study that illustrates how different involvement strategies are combined in political communication on a social networking site.

Variation and change: Historical pragmatics

All living languages are subject to variation at all levels of organization. Some of this variation leads to language change if larger groups of speakers start giving preference to a specific innovation. In this contribution we survey work that traces the diachronic variability at the level of language use, a field of research that is called historical pragmatics. After outlining some of the specific data problems that historical investigations of pragmatic variation have to deal with, we provide an overview of historical pragmatic work on specific periods, on diachronic change and on synchronic variation in earlier periods. Finally, we introduce the concept of “pragmatic variable” and discuss various methodological and theoretical problems.