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If follows from the above that language must be interpreted and not just
‘passively consumed’ in order to be meaningful to a language user. Language
itself enables humans to communicate their meanings but if communication is
to happen and be successful, the interpretation of meaning by the recipient has
to happen too. With regard to newspaper discourse, which is the focus of the
present chapter, it would be simplistic and wrong in essence to assume that the
journalist encodes a particular meaning and the receiver – the reader – decodes
it, i.e. interprets it, in exactly the way intended by the journalist. It should also
be noted that the sender in this context is not an individual journalist because a
journalist’s original report undergoes a number of changes during the strict and
elaborate process of editing by several editors and sub-editors, and the report
published finally in the newspaper is thus ‘a joint product’ rather than a ‘product
of an individual’, so the meaning is not encoded by an individual, i.e. a journalist
himself/herself. Moreover, the ‘joint product’ should be in accordance with the
paper’s ‘editorial line’, which is to a large extent governed by the intended/
implied readership of the paper, to whom the discourse should be coherent in
the first place.
At this point it needs to be emphasized that the readers of a particular
newspaper represent a heterogeneous rather than a homogenous group. Still,
newspapers need to and do work with the concept of ‘implied readership’
(cf. below), because they need to identify their ‘target group’ in terms of age,
profession or social status, as these will determine the range of topics and type of
news, the language used, and also the advertising potential, for example. Despite
such generalisations the readers of a particular newspaper do not represent an
easily identifiable group with identical views and opinions. It can by no means be
assumed that 1) all readers will derive the same meaning from the discourse, and
2) that the meaning derived by the readers is the same as the intended one. Still, the
same text or discourse may be coherent to individual readers, although possibly
in a different way because there are a number of factors which participate in the
process of meaning and discourse interpretation, such as the reader’s background
and personal experience, his/her social status and identity, views and attitudes,
and the social context (whether permanent or temporary), etc. Therefore, what
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