Abstract

Reporting Armistice: A study of language in context

When Australian newspapers reported news of the Boer War at the end of the 19th century, they were alone in having the capacity to communicate this news to the local population on a mass scale. By the time of the Iraq War in 2003, newspapers were just one of a number of modes of news dissemination, which had now grown to include television, radio, and internet sources, and whose reach was not geographically restricted. These changes in the media context, as well as other contextual shifts in culture and history, bear upon the meaning potential of news reports, both as individual texts (intra-textually) and in relation to other elements on the newspaper page (inter-textually).

This paper explores, from a linguistic perspective, the impact of a changing historical, institutional, and cultural context on the selection and interaction of verbal and visual meanings in Australian war reporting. The corpus comprises Sydney Morning Herald news reports about armistice or victory from the Boer War, World Wars I and II, Korean War , Vietnam War, Gulf War, and Iraq War. I discuss the impact particular contextual factors have on the uptake of meanings from the resources language and other modes provide. In particular, I focus on the contextual factors of communicative purpose, institutional imperatives, and social function of the newspaper, and I demonstrate the systematic and principled variation evident in the choices of meaning across the corpus.

This study demonstrates the usefulness of linguistic analysis for elucidating the patternings and nuances of meaning that both construe and are shaped by the context of situation. The findings of such an analysis lead to an understanding of changes in the use of language in the media over a century of reporting about, and mediating, the experience of war and armistice.

Claire Scott
Macquarie University