Faculty Colloquium

“Pedants, prudes and perjurers: The (mis)representation of language in the media”
Professor Crispin Thurlow
Department of Communication
Wednesday, April 16, 2008, 3:30-5 pm
Communications 126
Refreshments

To speak a language is not to command a code, but to act in a world that one accepts tacitly. Standardization and legitimation sanction certain ways of speaking, rewarding some while silencing others. The effect is to intimidate and censor speech without any discrete acts of intimidation or censoring. (Hank, 2005: 76, on Bourdieu, 1991)

This presentation is organized around my long-standing interest in metalanguage and, more recently, media commentary in which language, languages and language-related issues are more or less explicitly thematized.

From the perspective of Critical Discourse Studies, everyday metalanguage is of interest because it reveals both the performative enactment of language in people’s beliefs about language, as well as the discursive production of difference/inequality through the policing of the speakers of language/s. In the case of the media, metalanguistic analyses also expose the fabrication of “news” by journalists who, as professional language workers, are unusually invested in the deployment and regulation of words. I will draw together for the first time three studies of my own which examine various instances of “language ideology” at play.

In the first study, my colleagues and I consider the representation of local, non-English languages in popular television holiday programs (Jaworski, Thurlow et al., 2003/2007). Here, the devaluing of local languages promotes a regime of intercultural truth which problematically constructs subjectivities for hosts and identities for viewers.

In the second study, I turn to the print media’s consistently negative portrayal of young people’s new media discourse (Thurlow 2006, 2007). In this instance, language appears to function as a metadiscursive resource by which adults establish their own status at the expense of young people’s situated, creative language practices.

In the third study, my graduate colleague Jamie Moshin and I are currently looking at the range of typographic, linguistic and ideological choices made by news story tellers in their efforts to describe the supposedly unmentionable – specifically, taboo words (e.g. fuck) and taboo body parts (e.g. Britney Spear’s vagina).

In this last instance of mediatized metadiscourse we find a similarly confused disciplining of words and bodies, as well as an uncomfortable tension between the quest for “civil” discourse and the journalistic preoccupation with reporting the facts.

Professor Thurlow received his Ph.D. in Language and Communication from the University of Wales. He is co-author of Computer Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet (2004), Tourism Discourse: The Language of Global Mobility (2008), and co-editor of Talking Adolescence: Perspectives on Communication in the Teenage Years (2005).