Introduction

This chapter explores how disputes about media discourse are not all triggered by the same kinds of misunderstanding or disagreement. Some disputes are triggered by features of communicative behaviour, or use; others arise as complications with coded or inferred meaning; and others again follow from alleged discourse effects. This chapter draws some relevant distinctions between these three categories, and discusses the relation between them. Even a simplified three-way categorisation of this kind points to a need to distinguish types of communicative trouble, while acknowledging how far the three aspects are interwoven. I suggest that the three different emphases (use, meaning and effect) echo complementary perspectives of speaker, text and interpreter as a kind of ‘interpretive triangle’ in any dispute.

Three kinds of trouble

In introducing the term ‘meaning troublespot’ in Chapter 1, I suggested that whatever resonance this informal concept creates is linked to an implied claim: that related questions of meaning arise in disputes that find themselves in different categories when it comes to legal or regulatory classification. For the people concerned, as well as for their lawyers and in subsequent reporting, a dispute is about something like alleged defamation or product disparagement, negligent mis-statement or injurious falsehood, perjury, incitement to racial hatred, or misleading advertising practices. Yet each ‘meaning troublespot’ dispute contains a broadly corresponding knot of underlying problems to do with what the contested utterance or text means.