106
Considering the prominent roles of modern media, newspapers are no longer
mere transmitters of information; they also act, or
at least attempt to act, as creators
and promoters of particular social views and attitudes as well as moral guardians
and agenda setters (cf. e.g. Temple 2008). In this regard the interpretation of
meaning in newspaper discourse becomes an issue more crucial than ever before.
It is a widely acknowledged belief that more is communicated than actually
written or said, and in newspaper discourse it seems to be particularly true.
Newspaper discourse as a type of written discourse differs from
spoken
discourse mainly in that it is planned, prepared and well thought-out and it does
not allow negotiation of meaning between the sender and the recipient; in other
words, there is no “explicit construction of meaning” (Dontcheva-Navratilova
2011: 1). Yet despite the absence of contact between the two, newspaper
discourse still is and should be approached as a ‘form of communication’; it can
be seen as ‘a communication process’ which involves the encoding
and decoding
of messages and thus naturally also ‘interpretation of meaning’ and ‘discourse
interpretation’ in general. In this regard, cohesion and cohesive devices play a
central role in newspaper discourse since they enhance coherence and enable the
reader to make sense of discourse.
It is worth noting that not all linguists understand the relationship between
coherence and cohesion in the same way. In Hasan’s (1989) framework, the
interaction of cohesive devices (labelled by Hasan as ‘cohesive harmony’)
serves as a basis for perceived coherence, so coherence and cohesion are
viewed as mutually interdependent; in other words,
coherence is seen as
following from cohesion. Other linguists, for example Hoey (1991), Tanskanen
(2006), Dontcheva-Navratilova (2011) and Povolná (2007), view the two as
complementary but in essence independent of each other. In this perspective, as
Tanskanen (2006) explains,
... coherence is not inherent in text as such, but rather it is the result of the
interpretation process and ultimately depends on the relation between the receiver
and the text; …. cohesive devices predispose receivers to find the coherence …
(ibid.: 20).
Since in this view coherence is not a property of text or discourse itself but
is derived from text or
discourse by the receiver, it is not unusual that some
receivers will find a particular text meaningful and coherent, whereas to others
the same text may be uninterpretable, for example, due to a lack of background
knowledge (ibid.). Nevertheless, whether coherence and cohesion are seen as
interdependent or independent of each other, they unarguably aid or even govern
the interpretation of meaning, and are indispensable
constituents of human
communication, whether spoken or written.
107
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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