When the trails go cold : British press narratives on Maddie

Vol.35,No.1(2009)

Isabel Ermida

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/105122

PDF
Abstract
The amount and variety of press narratives on the disappearance of Madeleine McCann are fertile ground for critical discourse analysis. Not only do they offer ideologically informed representations of the actors involved in the plot, but also of the ethnic-cum-national groups to which they belong. In particular, the British coverage of the story largely focuses on the ensuing police investigation in Portugal, thus putting forth identity portrayals which arguably derive from value judgements. The present paper intends to examine the linguistic and discursive devices which convey marks of subjectivity and alignment, along with preferential portrayals and strategies of othering. Furthermore, it aims at discussing such issues as topic selection, perspective and focalisation, with a view to revealing mechanisms of construction of ethnic difference and alienation. The corpus of analysis is a set of news reports and opinion articles taken from two major UK titles: a quality paper, The Times, and a tabloid, The Sun.

Keywords:
ethnic; national; Maddie; press; discourse; ideology; representation; difference; othering; power

Pages:
45–62
References

Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Barbour, Stephen (2000) ' Nationalism, Language, Europe'. In: Barbour Stephen and Cathie Carmichael(eds.) Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: OUP, 1–17.

Baumann, Gerd (1999) The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking National, Ethnic, and Religious Identities. New York: Routledge.

Berdún, Guibernau, M. Montserrat and John Rex (1997) The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Migration. Cambridge, UK / Malden, MA: Polity Press; Blackwell Publishers.

Carmichael, Cathie (2000) ' Language and Nationalism in the Balkans'. In: Barbour Stephen and Cathie Carmichael (eds.) Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: OUP, 221–239.

Cohen, Phil (1999) New Ethnicities, Old Racisms? London and New York: Zed Books.

Eriksen, Thomas (1993) Us and Them in Modern Societies: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Mauritius, Trinidad and Beyond. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

Eriksen, Thomas (2002) Ethnicity and Nationalism. Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press.

Fairclough, Norman (2001) Language and Power. 2nd ed. London: Longman.

Fairclough, Norman (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual analysis for social research. LondonNY: Routledge.

Fishman, Joshua A. (1989) Language & Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. London: Multilingual Matters.

Fowler, Roger (1991) Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London and New York: Routledge.

Friesen, John W. (1993) When Cultures Clash: Case Studies in Multiculturalism. 2nd ed. Calgary, Alta: Detselig.

Garrett, Peter, Nikolas Coupland and Angie Williams (2003) Investigating Language Attitudes: Social Meanings of Dialect, Ethnicity and Performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Gellner, Ernest (2006) Nations and Nationalism (New Perspectives on the Past). 2nd ed. London: WileyBlackwell.

Grillo, R. D. (1998) Pluralism and the Politics of Difference: State, Culture, and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press.

Hafez, Ola (2000) ' Book review of S.H. Riggins (ed.) (1997)'. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 505–511. | DOI 10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00020-X

Hobsbaum, E. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: CUP.

May, Stephen (2001) Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language. London: Longman.

Myers, Garth, Thomas Klak and Timothy Koehl (1996) ' The inscription of difference: news coverage of the conflicts on Rwanda and Bosnia'. Political Geography, 15(1), 21–46.

O'Reilly, Camille C. (ed.) (2001) Language, Ethnicity and the State: Minority Languages in the European Union. Vol 1. London: Palgrave McMillan.

Ozkirimli, Umut (2000) Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Riggins, Stephen H. (ed.) (1997) The language and politics of exclusion: Others in discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Riggins, Stephen H (1997) ' The Rhetoric of Othering'. In: Riggins, Stephen H. (ed.) (1997) The language and politics of exclusion: Others in discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 3–29.

Said, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. 25th anniversary ed. 2003. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Singh, Ishtla (1999) ' Language and ethnicity'. In: Thomas, Linda and Shân Wareing (eds.) Language, Society and Power. London: Routledge.

Smith, Anthony D. (1991) National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Smith, Anthony D. (1995) Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. London: Polity Press.

Tuman, Joseph S. (2003) Communicating terror: The rhetorical dimensions of terrorism. London: Sage.

van Dijk, Teun A. (1991) Racism and the Press. London and New York: Routledge.

van Dijk, Teun A. (1998) Ideology. London: Sage.

Williams, Colin H. (1994) Called Unto Liberty: On Language and Nationalism. London: Multilingual Matters.

Metrics

4

Views

0

PDF views

PDF