0Preface

This manual in the series of Romance Linguistics is dedicated to the use of Romance languages in the media. It focuses on media linguistic research on Romance languages and media linguistic approaches from Romance countries and Romance studies. Today, media culture is clearly global, but media content is delivered in different (also Romance) languages and is part of language-bound discourses. Unlike in everyday language, where “media” usually means analog or digital messages, the term “media” in media and communication studies and linguistics is a rather broad one, and so is the term “message”. “Media” can mean the air carrying acoustic waves from a mouth to an ear; it can mean the wire between two landline telephones carrying electronic signals converted from speech; it can mean an application on a smartphone which displays text and pictures sent from another smartphone; it can mean a radio receiver.

No manual of linguistics can cover all media in the broadest sense of the term. Besides the fact that much research has been done on fundamental questions by media and communication studies, there has also been research from the linguistic perspective for decades. Nonetheless, the articles in this volume cite and reflect the most relevant publications in their respective fields. Print media have long been the basis of both communication studies and media linguistics, and investigations of the language in newspapers abound (cf., e. g., the volume edited by Dahmen et al. 2006 and the overview in Wilhelm 2006) – not only because these media are the oldest, but also because they provided easy access for linguistic research even before the computer-assisted possibilities of analysis had emerged: text and visuals were directly available without technological aid. Such media are called “secondary media” in the terminology of Pross (1972): they require technical devices only on the sender’s side.

Pross’s study, which became highly influential in German media studies, distinguishes between primary, secondary and tertiary media. In the case of primary media, no device is interposed between sender and recipient of a media text, and people’s senses are sufficient to produce, transport and consume the message (cf. Pross 1972, 145). Secondary media require technical devices for content production but not for content perception. Tertiary media depend on technical devices for content production and content perception. The distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary media according to the technical support needed to produce and to receive content is still the dominant classification in the German-speaking areas. Other classifications operate according to the sense of perception (visual, auditive, audiovisual) or according to the relationship between the sender and the addressed public.

This manual shall focus on tertiary media. They emerged somewhat later than secondary media and comprise mainly mass media such as radio, television and Internet, but also interpersonal communication media such as telephone and messenger services.

Some academics in the field of media and communication studies argue that the blurring of frontiers between the media which has taken place since the arrival and spread of the Internet necessitate a new category in the traditional threefold system, and propose “quaternary media” which cover the digital field (cf. Faßler 1997; for a discussion, cf. Büttner 2015). This discussion is still going on, and will possibly become even more complex with the proceeding diversification and cross-hybridization within digital media. This volume does, therefore, not differentiate any further than the so-called “tertiary media” and includes in this category all kinds of media that require a technical device on both sides of the communication process. The contributions in this volume, thus, do not focus on conventional media like newspapers, magazines, and print advertisements, but since research in media linguistics heavily relies on the findings that have been made with respect to such media, they will frequently refer to them and clarify when there are differences regarding tertiary media.

As mentioned above, research on media is no recent academic trend, tracing its origins as far back as the turn of the 20th century with the creation of the first university departments for media studies (1916: Institut für Zeitungskunde ‘department for newspaper research’, University of Leipzig, Germany; 1919: The New School University New York, U.S.). The Romance countries established similar departments for media and communication studies only after the Second World War, generally following the lead of German and U.S. academics (in France, for instance, the C.E.C.MAS – Centre d ’Études des Communications de Masse, founded in 1960 in Paris, cf. Barthes 1961).

Linguistic studies of texts have always been studies in media linguistics avant la lettre: be it literature, personal letters, or proclamations, all these sources are “mediabound” in a broad sense of the term. What we call nowadays “media linguistics” is mostly related to a) mass media and b) media requiring a device on at least one side of the communication process (cf., e. g., Helfrich 2006).

In contrast to most approaches in text linguistics, media linguistics regularly focuses on the polysemiotic character of media texts: media texts are normally multicodal, i.e., they are combined of verbal, para- and nonverbal signs or, in semiotic terms, involve different types of symbolic and/or iconic and indexical signs (cf., e. g., Fricke 2012; Kress/van Leeuwen 2001; Weidenmann 2002). This multicodality of media texts has lately attracted the interest of linguistic research with the boom of studies on image communication and pictorial linguistics, studies on audiovisual translation and media linguistics. Audiovisual texts are not only multicodal, but, additionally, multimodal, i.e., they involve different senses.

In the past, research in media linguistics often focused on phenomena on the linguistic surface, neglecting the findings that had been made in disciplines such as media and communication studies, film studies, sociology, visual anthropology, and others. Conversely, these disciplines often refer to media-related societal processes without taking into account the role of language. Interdisciplinary research, or at least the reception and consideration of the other disciplines’ theories, models, and debates, should be obvious and is yet rare. Many authors in this volume establish ties to the other disciplines, but interdisciplinarity still remains a desideratum.

Another field that still lacks attention is research on media issues in Romance languages. During the editing process of this manual, authors and editors have become more and more aware that some Romance-speaking areas generate very little research on language in the media. This is notably the case for Romania, Portugal and Brazil. However, there are also remarkable lacunae in some domains of media linguistics in the French, Spanish and Italian-speaking areas, especially as to modern research methodology with regards to digital media (an early exception is the 2004 volume on Romance studies and the “new” media, edited by Dahmen et al.). In the meantime, the traditional departments of Romance philology in Germany, Switzerland and Austria generate much investigation in Romance media linguistics, which is also the reason why many of the authors in this volume are based in these countries and are part of the German-speaking academic community.

Although many aspects are underrepresented in Romance media linguistics research, some theories and findings are universal. This is another argument for more interdisciplinary exchange – and the principal reason to edit this volume in English and not in the respective Romance languages.

With the intent to cover current international research on languages in the media, this volume starts with a general and universal outline by Heinz-Helmut Lüger regarding media and communication studies, linguistics and their overlaps. He sums up the most important theories and models in both communication studies and linguistics and shows the potential of interdisciplinary research.

This first overview is followed by 21 articles in five sections, focused on different aspects of media linguistics and languages.

The articles in section I take up the matter of text and its linguistic analysis (cf., e. g., Pérennec 2000) with regards to tertiary media. Martina Schrader-Kniffki and Nadine Rentel present theories and methods of text linguistics applied to different text types. Schrader-Kniffki’s contribution focuses on text linguistic analysis of movies and television and thus also includes the emerging subject of multimodal media texts. Rentel’s contribution presents classifications of online texts and their specific features, using Twitter microblog entries to exemplify the theoretical descriptions.

The concrete textual features of the most common tertiary media are presented in the next three chapters: Kristin Reinke discusses textuality and textual features of television and exemplifies the notion of “prototypical text type” through the newscast. Kathrin Wenz shows in what respect online text types follow well-known discourse traditions (cf., e. g., Frank-Job 2010) or emerge as discrete media text types on their own account. She focuses on blogs, an online-specific medium which presents features of both traditional text types and innovative characteristics. Whereas many other text types, especially in the media, have no persuasive intent, this is a central feature of advertising. Tilman Schröder outlines in his contribution on online advertising how advertisers make use of multimodality and interactivity in order to reach their goal of persuasion.

The contributions in section II are dedicated to the distinction of orality and literacy in the media. Several tertiary media present a coexistence of visually and aurally perceived elements, and whilst the medial distinction of both is rather clear, there is no such explicit frontier as to the conception of the messages.

Kristina Bedijs shows how the different medial codes interact in movies and television, and how the conceptional continuum (cf. Koch/Oesterreicher 22011) can be applied to different text types in these genres. Louise-Amélie Cougnon and Jean-Léon Bouraoui describe the recent history of telephony, originally a typical medium of interpersonal oral communication which is undergoing an enormous evolution towards a mixed, multimodal medium (cf., e. g., Reinkemeyer 2013). The aforementioned multimodality is also a key concept in Anja Overbeck’s contribution. She sums up the different theoretical approaches to describe online communication for linguistic purposes (cf., e. g., the contributions on microblogs in the Romance languages in Siever/Schlobinski 2013).

The articles in section III present research methods commonly used in media linguistics.

A field that has been gaining ground for several decades now is discourse linguistics (cf., e. g., van Dijk 2007). The linguistic analysis of media discourse is often used to explain not only strictly linguistic phenomena, but also societal processes. Antonio Bañón Hernández sums up the most important theoretical lines.

Multicodality and multimodality (cf., e. g., Kress/van Leeuwen 2001) are particularly prominent in online communication. The analysis of such complex media texts requires special diligence and categories which are presented in the contribution by Uta Fröhlich.

Daniel Perrin explains methods of analyzing written text from the process perspective (cf., e. g., Weinzierl/Wrobel 2017). He demonstrates a way of writing process research through the genesis of a news text which undergoes several steps of rewording by the journalist.

Corpus linguistics is a well-known method to analyze language usage in a collection of texts (cf. the volumes edited by Pusch/Raible 2002/2005). Computers have been helping in the process for a long time now, but have gained even greater importance with the growth of the Internet and the possibility to create huge specialized corpora from the infinite abundance of texts available online. The collective article on corpus linguistics provides an overview of the existing tertiary media corpora in the Romance languages: Kristina Bedijs on French, Stefan Schneider on Italian, Daniel Kallweit on Spanish, Carme Colominas on Catalan, Martina Schrader-Kniffki on Portuguese and Paula Bouzas on Galician.

Whilst the sections I to III concern rather universal questions of media linguistics that could be investigated in every language, section IV is dedicated to issues only relevant for the Romance-speaking regions.

Two articles present the situation of small languages in the media and their consideration in linguistic research (cf., e. g., Dahmen et al. 2016). Judith Visser describes to what extent Picard is used in medial communication – with the particularity that Picard is a minority language within the territory of France, which means that there is a diglottic concurrence with the official language French and that the audience is mostly bilingual. The situation of Romanian, described in the contribution by Maren Huberty, is different in that it is the official language of two countries (Romania and Moldova) and not of a minority. Yet Romanian is viewed as a “small language” since it is less widespread and less considered in linguistic research (cf., e. g., Dahmen/Munteanu 2004).

The case is very different for Latin American Spanish, the focus of Gabriele Knauer’s contribution. Not only is Spanish the official language in many Southern and Central American countries, it is also spreading in the United States, where Spanish is by now the second most spoken language. In every big regional speech community, a specific variety of Spanish predominates. For media linguistics, it is interesting to investigate to what extent these regional norms are used in the media, in which contexts they are used and how much prestige they are ascribed by media producers and by the audience (cf., e. g., Wilkinson 2016).

Media are said to be an important motor of language change, be it grammar, lexicon or pronunciation. Carsten Sinner provides insight into this subject regarding the Romance languages and also touches upon the presumption that language use in the media promotes language decay (cf., e. g., Chambers 1998; Dürscheid/Wagner/Brommer 2010; Plewnia/Witt 2014). The diachronic evolution is also the subject of Gudrun Held’s contribution on advertising language (cf., e. g., Gerstenberg 2006).

Section V closes the manual with four contributions on multilingualism in Romance-speaking media.

Fernando Ramallo exemplifies the case of media using more than one language in Galicia, a bilingual region in Spain (cf., e. g., Becker 2016).

Rocío Baños sums up the different options for providing access to movies and television for the hearing or the visually impaired and for language learners through additional visual or auditive elements – namely subtitles, dubbing and voiceover (cf., e. g., Díaz Cintas/Remael 22014; Díaz Cintas/Baños Piñero 2015).

Beyond the services of professional translators, translation of media has become an issue for laypeople since the Internet allows outsourcing this work onto the shoulders of many volunteers. Verena Thaler describes possibilities and issues of crowdsourcing (cf., e. g., European Commission 2012; Klaus 2014) in her contribution.

Another growing field in translation is software localization, the need to adapt software to a regional audience (cf. Jiménez-Crespo 2013). This is the subject of Falk Seiler’s contribution, closing the manual.

Many people have contributed to the success of this project. First and foremost, we would like to thank all the many authors who have contributed to this manual. The editors of the series, Günter Holtus and Fernando Sánchez Miret, have given us valuable feedback at various stages of the project. Paul Willin and Jacob Jones have done a great job in proofreading and copy-editing all the articles. Swenja Schum has proven her excellent skills in laying out parts of the text of the manual. Catharina Struve has managed the last stage of the layout; Pia Roser created the index. We could count on so many excellent colleagues and helpful hands and hope that our manual will now be of use for the researchers and students for whom we conceived it.