Dear SLICE friends
June 12–13, the SLICE Media strand organized a Round Table in Copenhagen on Sociolinguistics and the Talking Media: Style, Mediation and Change.
On behalf of the organizers – Nikolas Coupland, Janus Mortensen, and Jacob Thøgersen – the latter has sent a report of the event, as well as a picture of the participants, so votre vieux rédacteur is proud to present the first issue of SLICE News with a picture...
SLICE Media news: Copenhagen Roundtable 12-13 June
The SLICE Media strand met an important milestone this June when the first SLICE event to focus solely on media took place. Several SLICE’rs and like-minded friends (28 in total) met for two full days leading up to the Sociolinguistic Symposium to discuss Sociolinguistics and the Talking Media: Style, Mediation and Change.
By way of summarizing the rich discussions of the 2 days, below you’ll find the program as well as Nik’s hand-out for his introduction which discussed the relation between the three central concepts of the roundtable (and indeed SLICE Media).
The discussions were centred on draft versions of the papers which had been circulated before the meeting. Thanks to the participants’ willingness to take on the extra work of writing their paper before presenting it, this meant more time could be spent on the presentation and discussion of actual media data. Often we simply don’t have the time to present data in a 20 minutes presentation. That’s a shame. Seeing and hearing the multi-medial data – and even hearing voices and timing in “mono-medial” radio talk – changes one’s perspective of the analyses. Negotiations are underway as to publishing the papers; we currently have strong interest from two publishers. How to include media data so future readers can also benefit from access to the data is something for the editors to think about.
We believe the roundtable was a big success. It showed both the coherence within SLICE in terms of data, methods, theories and results across the different states and areas; it also opened new avenues for discussion of media and mediatisation as rich channels of style, stylization and sociolinguistic change. Some discussions could (almost) be settled, other discussions are only just beginning.
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STYLE, MEDIATION and CHANGE – Introductory notes [by Nik Coupland]
STYLE - 6 reasons for doing style:
Sociolinguistics of style has gradually taken shape over 40+ years
audience design, speaker design, communities of practice, ‘third wave variationism’, indexicality in interaction… but also ‘sociolinguistics and the media’.
Style is simultaneously a focal concept in social semiotics and CDA
4 ‘key dimensions of social semiotic analysis: discourse, genre, style and modality. Style is how genres are performed; style expresses identities and values.
3 kinds of style: individual style, social style, and lifestyle.
(Media data and issues have been prominent in this literature.)
Style and styling: structure and agency, stability and flux
Styles are ‘ways of doing something’, including ways of speaking and ways of being.
Style configurations make up the sociolinguistic order, but any given instance is in flux, in the process of being made (or unregistered) or unmade. Styling is the agentive process of interactional meaning-making, where the stability of a style is constructed, confirmed or challenged.
Style and styling are pervasively relevant
Dialect styles, personal or social styles, narrative styles, visual styles, corporate styles, national styles, sub-cultural styles, music styles, orthographic styles …
Style and styling have particular epochal relevance
The reflexive modernisation thesis: an era of heightened sociolinguistic and semiotic reflexivity. Metalinguistic/ metapragmatic processes have always attended language; metacultural processes have always attended culture. But the present age is one of massively visible diversity, and greater fluidity in the styling of individuals, groups, institutions, lives…
The style allows us to look at similar processes operating across different languages
This has particular relevance in the SLICE context. But theoretically, it allows us to address multilingual sociolinguistic issues without necessarily assuming that language codes are the touchstone for the difference.
MEDIA
Mediation and mediatisation
‘Media’ are a principal resource for reflexivity.
Mediation: the universal process of fitting/ extextualising a communicative act into the constraints and affordances of any particular social situation.
Meditation: the historical process by which we increasingly consume ‘difference’ via technological media, and by which we increasingly participate socially by technological means.
What are ‘the talking media’?
When language use is mediated into technological systems through which human voices and spoken interactions become objects of public awareness, consumption, evaluation and engagement. The talk was made mobile.
Old media are not ‘old’; there is no clear-cut division between ‘mass-mediated talk’ and ‘unmediated talk’. But private-public relations are negotiated in the styling of language under highly reflexive conditions.
Display, performance and stylisation
The talking media are enmeshed in considerations of authenticity, sincerity and control. Are mediated identities more displayed than articulated? TV is a stylising medium, where stylisation refers to the knowing deployment of recontextualising styles under uncertain (reflexive) conditions of ownership and strategy.
CHANGE
Where to locate change?
Mediatisation is changing, but it differs from place to place. There is also a change in how the media are constituted over time.
Change in sociolinguistics and in what it studies
Early sociolinguistics as a Modernist project; assumed that people lived their lives among ‘similars and familiars’ – groups of ‘people like us’ acting as norm-enforcing mechanisms. These are much less relevant today, under an ideology of individualisation. This can be a burden: the problem of ‘meta-reflexivity’.
Language change, social change, sociolinguistic change
The mainstream approach has been ‘language change’, where style is treated as a methodological problem. But style is relevant to some facets of language change.
We need to put the social change back into the mix. How are conditions for language use changing, epoch to epoch? What new socio-cultural conditions are created by (prominent or recursive) acts of (mediated) sociolinguistic styling?
Construing sociolinguistic change: change in language/ society relationships, including language-ideological change, new patterns and impact of media(tisa)tion.
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Copenhagen Round Table
12–13 June 2014
Program
Thursday 12 June
09.15 – 09.20 Welcome
Bente Legarth Holmberg, Head of Department of Nordic Research
09.20 – 10.00 Introduction to the round table
Nikolas Coupland, Jacob Thøgersen, Janus Mortensen
10.00 – 10.45 The role of the talking media in the formation and circulation of
linguistic stereotypes
Allan Bell
11.00 – 11.45
Intonation and discourse change in BBC radio broadcasts
Colleen Cotter
11.45 – 12.30 The style and stylization of old news reading in Danish
Jacob Thøgersen
13.30 – 14.15 Negotiating linguistic standardization in Flemish TV fiction around
1980: Laying the grounds for a new linguistic normality
Sarah Van Hoof & Jürgen Jaspers
14.15 – 15.00 The combination of linguistic variety, gender and personality
in radio plays for children
Agnete Nesse
15.15 – 16.00 Bridging the gap: The role of style in language change linked
to the broadcast media
Jane Stuart-Smith
16.00 – 16.45 Vocal style in news reading
Theo van Leeuwen
16.45 – 17.30
Talking for fun and talking in earnest ‘on the air’
Martin Montgomery
Friday 13 June
09.00 – 09.45 Television as art: Style, individualism and mediation of engagement
Adam Jaworski
09.45 – 10.30 Narratorial style and tellability in the mediatized personal experience
of a 7/7 survivor: Martine’s story
Marina Lambrou
10.45 – 11.30
‘Greekophrenia’: Mono/bilingual order, conflict and entropy in
satirical radio talk
Tereza Spilioti
11.30 – 12.15 Representations of multiethnic youth styles in Danish broadcast media
Pia Quist
13.15 – 14.00 Small changes in Spanish political broadcasting?
Incisive interviewing and the news show Salvados
Nuria Lorenzo-Dus
14.00 – 14.45 Styling street credibility on the public byways: On the gradual
glocalization of dialect music performances
Jan-Ola Östman
15.00 – 15.45 Styling the ordinary: Tele-factual genres and participant identities
Joanna Thornborrow
15.45 – 17.00 General Discussion
– Martin Montgomery and all