Abstract
Controversy is a term that journalists (and others) use in their texts and discourse, a feature of language in use. In news discourse it is routinely used as an event category, a way of naming and categorizing the events that journalists report. Journalists narrate controversies using event categories that appear as part of natural phenomenon, historical event, and pragmatic event formulas. They index events through a wide range of selectivity and individuation. The first formula contributes to our experience of controversies as forces of nature, autopoietic processes that develop beyond human agency, decision making, and control. The second and third contribute to our experience of controversies as relatively discrete historical and discursive phenomena, with the third regularly depicting individual human agents as interlocutors. These three formulas not only contribute to narratives of public controversies but also to the shape of the news article as a genre.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The terms “foregrounding” and “backgrounding” refer to the degree of salience a particular element of a narrated event will be given depending on the particular kind of utterance used in narrating it. Some posit a kind of “saliency hierarchy” involved in discourse (Fillmore 1977, p. 78). Foregrounded elements will be those that have higher salience in the discourse. Features of high transitivity are associated with high salience, and therefore with foregrounding (Hopper and Thompson 1980, p. 283). These terms can be traced to Prague School linguists (cf. for example Havranek 1932, pp. 9–10; Mukarovsky 1932, p. 29).
References
Agha, A. 2007. Language and social relations, Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aitchison, J. 2007. The word weavers: Newshounds and wordsmiths. Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Becker, A.L. 1995. Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Bell, A. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13: 145–204.
Bell, A. 1991. The language of news media. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Bennett, J.F. 1988. Events and their names. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Benoit, P.J., and D. Hample. 1998. The meaning of two cultural categories: Avoiding interpersonal arguments or cutting them short. In Argument in a time of change: Definitions, frameworks, and critiques, 97–102. Annandale: National Communication Association.
Biber, D. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cramer, P.A. 2008. Controversy as a media event category. In Rhetoric in detail: Discourse analyses of rhetorical talk and text, Discourse approaches to politics, society and culture, vol. 31, 279–305. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dallinger, J.M., and D. Hample. 2002. The image of the ideal arguer. In Arguing communication & culture, vol. 1, 285–291. Washington, DC: National Communication Association.
Dijk, T.A.V. 1988. News as discourse. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Du Bois, J.W. 1980. Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse. In The pear stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production, 203–274. Norwood: Ablex.
Fillmore, C.J. 1977. The case for case reopened. In Grammatical relations, Syntax and semantics, vol. 8, 59–81. New York: Academic Press.
Fowler, R. 1991. Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. London/New York: Routledge.
Geisler, C. 1994. Academic literacy and the nature of expertise: Reading, writing, and knowing in academic philosophy. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Halliday, M.A.K., and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Hample, D., and P.J. Benoit. 1999. Must arguments be explicit and violent: A study of naive social actors’ understandings. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference of the international society for the study of argumentation, 306–310. Amsterdam: SicSat.
Hample, D., P.J. Benoit, J. Houston, G. Purifoy, V. VanHyfte, and C. Wardwell. 1999. Naive theories of argument: Avoiding interpersonal arguments or cutting them short. Argumentation and Advocacy 35: 130–139.
Haviland, J.B. 1996. Text from talk in Tzotzil. In Natural histories of discourse, ed. M. Silverstein and G. Urban, 45–78. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Havranek, B. 1932. The functional differentiation of the standard language. In A Prague school reader on esthetics, literary structure, and style, 3–16. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Hoey, M. 2005. Lexical priming: A new theory of words and language. London/New York: Routledge.
Hopper, P.J. 1987. Emergent grammar. Berkeley Linguistics Society 13: 139–157.
Hopper, P.J. 1995. The category ‘event’ in natural discourse and logic. In Discourse, grammar, and typology, Studies in language companion series, vol. 27, 139–152. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hopper, P.J. 1998. Emergent grammar. In The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure, 155–175. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Hopper, P.J., and S.A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56: 251–299.
Hopper, P.J., and S.A. Thompson. 1984. The discourse basis for lexical categories in universal grammar. Language 60: 703–751.
Johnstone, B. 1994. Repetition in discourse. Norwood: Ablex.
Kaufer, D., S. Ishizaki, B. Butler, and J. Collins. 2004. The power of words: Unveiling the speaker and writer’s hidden craft. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Kress, G.R., and B. Hodge. 1979. Language as ideology. London/Boston: Routledge/Kegan Paul.
Labov, W., and J. Waletzky. 1967. Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In Essays on the verbal and visual arts, ed. J. Helm, 12–44. Seattle: American Ethnological Society/University of Washington Press.
Lord, A.B., S. Mitchell, and G. Nagy. 2000. The singer of tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Martin, J.R. 1992. English text: System and structure. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Mourelatos, A.P. 1981. Events, processes, and states. In Syntax and semantics 14: Tense and aspect, Syntax and semantics, vol. 14, 191–212. New York: Academic Press.
Mukarovsky, J. 1932. Standard language and poetic language. In A Prague school reader on esthetics, literary structure, and style, 17–30. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
National Weather Service. 2009. Naming hurricanes. Retrieved from http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/HAW2/english/basics/naming.shtml.
O’Keefe, D.J. 1977. Two concepts of argument. The Journal of the American Forensic Association 13: 121–128.
Silverstein, M. 1979. Language structure and linguistic ideology. In The elements: A parasession on linguistic units and levels, April 20–21, 1979: [proceedings], Conference on Non-Slavic Languages of the USSR, ed. P.R. Clyne, C.L. Hofbauer and W.F. Hanks, 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Silverstein, M. 1985. The functional stratification of language and ontogenesis. In Culture, communication, and cognition: Vygotskian perspectives, ed. J.V. Wertsch, 205–235. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, M. 1993. Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In Reflexive language: Reported speech and metapragmatics, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, A. 1978. The long road to objectivity and back again: The kinds of truth we get in journalism. In Newspaper history from the seventeenth century to the present day, 153–171. London/Beverly Hills: Constable/Sage Publications.
Trew, T. 1979b. Theory and ideology at work. In Language and control, 94–116. London/Boston: Routledge/Kegan Paul.
Tuchman, G. 1980. Making news: A study in the construction of reality. New York/London: Free Press/Collier Macmillan.
Urban, G. 1996. Entextualization, replication, power. In Natural histories of discourse, ed. M. Silverstein and G. Urban, 21–44. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Vendler, Z. 1967. Linguistics in philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
White, P. 1997. Death, disruption, and the moral order: The narrative impulse in mass-media hard news reporting. In Genre and institutions: Social processes in the workplace and school, 101–133. London: Cassell.
Young, R.E., and A.L. Becker. 1966. The role of lexical and grammatical cues in paragraph recognition. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan. Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/33/32/98.pdf.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cramer, P.A. (2011). Controversy as an Event Category. In: Controversy as News Discourse. Argumentation Library, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1288-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1288-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-1287-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-1288-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)