Full text loading...
-
The meanings of “war”: From lexis to context
-
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations
- Source: Journal of Language and Politics, Volume 12, Issue 3, Jan 2013, p. 424 - 444
-
Abstract
In this paper I interpret findings from a project investigating media coverage of the 2003 “Coalition” invasion of Iraq, drawing on a corpus of news reports from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV news. The findings reported are evidence of a consistency that reflects the unconscious working of an ideology about “war”, with ideology considered in linguistic terms as a “configurative rapport” (Whorf 1956). To trace some dimensions of this ideology, I explore the meanings of “war”, its linguistic reactances, and its consequences for the creation of text with respect to registers of news discourse. I consider “war” from the point of view of lexis: its referential meaning, its relation to other related signs, (Saussure 1974), its denotative and connotative meanings (Hasan 2003) and its collocation and colligational potentials (Firth 1937[1964], 1962). I then consider it from the point of view of text-in-context (e.g. Halliday & Hasan 1985). The paper extends the 30 year interest in the relations of language, mind and society that have characterised studies of ideology in critical linguistics/CDA. Keywords: Iraq; ideology; configurative rapport; text-in-context