This chapter explores media discourse using the concept of dialogism, or intertextuality. This means conceiving of a media text as a tissue of voices and traces of other texts; when we engage with it we go into dialogue with them. In studying media texts, we need to be aware that they are dialogic, or embedded in a mesh of intertextuality:

Part of its appeal as a conceptual framework ‘is that it enables us to think of media discourse as being qualitatively continuous with the experience of everyday life’ (Meinhof and Smith 1995a: 3).

Intertextuality is about interconnections. Starting with its most obvious examples, a Desperate housewives instalment that begins ‘Previously on Desperate Housewives…’ is connecting back to the previous episode alluded to. Similarly, speech reportage (for example, indirect speech: ‘Zac said you kidnapped his father so you could kill him’) involves explicit signalling of one utterance inserted into another (in this case, the voice of Zac into another's). There are also intertextual connections of less obvious, foregrounded kinds.

Media discourse is a multidisciplinary field. In addition to extensive interest in media and cultural studies, it is the subject of scrutiny in linguistics – particularly conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics and sociolinguistics – and also in cultural geography, psychology, sociology and tourismstudies. This diversity and spread is both a strength and a weakness. There have been developments in parallel in a range of disciplines. One concern of this book is to explore some overlapping concerns, common origins and influences. The disciplinary diversity of media discourse as a field is reflected in its methodologies. However, discourse analysis is a method that cuts across many of them, and the conventions of discourse analysis are at the heart of this book.

What is media discourse and whystudy it?

Very few of us, if any, are unaffected by media discourse. The importance of the media in the modern world is incontrovertible. For some sections of society, at least, the media have largely replaced older institutions (such as the Church, or trade unions) as the primary source of understanding of the world. Since discourse plays a vital role in constituting people's realities, the implications for the power and influence of media discourse are clear. Moreover, in modern democracies the media serve a vital function as a public forum. In principle, journalists are committed to democratic principles in relation to the government, hence to provision of a diversity of sources of opinion about it – a function (highly) idealised as the provision of ‘a robust, uninhibited, and wide-open marketplace of ideas, in which opposing views may meet, contend, and take each other's measure’ (Gurevitch and Blumler 1990:269).

As we enter an era of interactive media technology, the interface between media texts and audience is transforming, including new ways of accessing content and new possibilities for social engagement in a virtual environment, be it radio, television, the (still) largely written mode of the Internet, or a combination of all three. The late Roger Silverstone reflected that

A convenient example of this, for me, is a university website providing contact details for staff. It is now common to be contacted by students worldwide, not just those at the same university. This generates a sense of being a globally available ‘amenity’, a phenomenon that can be experienced as an imposition or a pleasure in equal measure. But the Internet also offers such amenities as interactive maps, downloadable music resources on demand and so on. The notion of ‘interactivity’ raises interesting issues of definition (see, for example, Christensen 2003, Downes and McMillan 2000, Jensen 1999, Schultz 2000). Here, I am understanding it not primarily it in terms ofenhanced content and access, but as social interaction. This final chapter turns to interactivity between members of audience communities and members of production communities: the reality and the rhetoric.

There is a range of concerns common to both media and cultural studies and critical discourse analysis, relating to shifts and reconfigurations that can be said to characterise the modern world. These concerns are the subject of this chapter.

I begin with issues relating to time, place and their compression in the modern media. I then go on to outline two tensions or dichotomies that will be familiar to anyone working in the field of media discourse. These are public and private, information and entertainment. Fairclough relates themto two tendencies, which he identifies (in characteristically abstract nominalisations) as the conventionalisation of public affairs media and marketisation in the shift towards entertainment (Fairclough 1995a: 10). The chapter concludes with attention to other hybrid media genres, including pastiche and parody.

Time and place

Discursive events always involve some form of addresser and addressee. If we take the example of a live theatre performance, both the actors (the addressers) and the audience (the addressees) are physically co-present, so that production (at least, its end result in a rehearsed performance) and consumption are taking place at the same time. Discourse in the media tends to be rather different; there is typically a considerable distance, in space and often in time, between the production of a media text and its consumption. In itself, of course, this disjunction between production and consumption is by no means a modern phenomenon. In fact, it is as old as writing itself.

In this chapter I focus on the meaning potential of texts and conceptualisations of the reader/listener/viewer who engages with it. There have been theoretical shifts in perceptions of a text and its reception. In an article on news analysis, Meinhof points to early text-based studies that work with ‘closed text models’, according to which meaning is assumed to originate in the text and interpreters of it are mere ‘reading subjects constructed by the text’ (1994: 213). If considered at all, the addressee is treated as ‘a fiction embodied in the writer's rhetorical choices’ (Hyland 2005: 12). Meinhofs subject is news analysis; as examples, she cites the Glasgow University Media Group (1976, 1980), early critical linguistics (Fowler et al. 1979) and screen theory (Heath and Skirrow 1977). However, her observation applies equally to analyses of other textual forms. Names for this fiction include the ‘inscribed’ reader (Volosinov [1923] 1973) of Marxist philosophy of language, the ‘postulated reader’ (Booth 1961) of literary theory, the ‘model reader’ (Eco 1979) of semiotics, the ‘implied reader’ (Leech and Short 1981) of stylistics and the ‘ideal spectator’ (Brunsdon 1982) of screen theory.

In contrast with text-based studies, research using reader-based models operates ‘with a more open version of what the text means’ (Meinhof1994: 213). Meinhofcites as examples reception studies, where actual viewers are consulted (e.g. Morley 1980), and approaches that attend to the circulation of meanings and specifically to potential discrepancies between inscribed and actual addressees (e.g., Hall et al. 1980).

KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER

This chapter continues the examination begun in Chapter 6 of the text-worlds which relate to remote or unrealised situations. As we have already seen in the preceding analysis of instructive and informative discourses, the creation of imaginary states of affairs is not confined to literary fiction alone, but is a common feature of all types of communication in the everyday world. In Chapter 6 we saw how expressions of unfulfilled wishes and desires trigger the creation of discrete text-worlds with their own world-building and function-advancing elements. Such boulomaic and deontic modal-worlds, whether they originate in the discourse-world or in a text-world, exist at a conceptual distance from their creators. In the present chapter, the notion of conceptual distance will be explored in more detail and the investigation of the text-worlds of modalised discourse will be extended. The discussion here concentrates on the articulation of knowledge and belief through language and the processes by which such abstract concepts are conceptually managed. Two different types of political discourse, a speech and a transcript of a television debate, are analysed in order to uncover the conceptual structures which underpin them.

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In Chapter 2 we saw how the participants in a discourse-world are wilfully engaged in an act of communication which is greatly dependent on various kinds of knowledge. We saw how different aspects of discourse require us to access different areas of our perceptual, linguistic, experiential and cultural knowledge in a process which is essentially text-driven. Our existing knowledge frames enable us to conceptualise and understand discourse and we use them as the basis for the mental representations we create of the language we encounter. This chapter examines how the process of constructing these mental representations, or text-worlds, is facilitated. It begins the exploration of the precise conceptual structure of the worlds we create in our minds, which will form the focus of the coming chapters of this book. Of central interest in this chapter is the relationship between our conceptualisation of real-world experiences and our mental representation of discourse. In particular, this chapter investigates how our understanding of physical space and the progress of time in our everyday lives has a direct influence on how we create text-worlds from discourse. The processes by which we begin to conceptualise the spatial and temporal setting of a text-world are examined in relation to an internet audio-guide and some extracts from literary prose fiction.

It is highly unlikely that your first intention when opening this book was to find yourself an old cockerel with whom to settle down in Dorset. Nevertheless, having now read his advertisement, you will have formed in your mind a particular impression of this lonely heart seeking a hen. Likewise, the first intention of Old Cockerel (let us call him) is unlikely to have been to make contact with the readers of Text World Theory: An Introduction. Nevertheless, he has succeeded in communicating, however indirectly, a picture of his needs to you. In the limited number of words available to him, he has been careful to specify his age (57), occupation (ex-farmer), and geographical location (South East England). Each of these linguistic details enables Old Cockerel's intended audience (of single female Guardian readers aged 45–55) to construct a picture of him in their minds despite being separated from him in both time and space. It is a mental picture which Old Cockerel hopes will be sufficiently impressive to attract a response from his ideal mate. To help him achieve success, he employs poetic devices alongside the personal details he provides.

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This chapter explores how text-worlds develop in the human mind. Once the spatial and temporal parameters of a text-world have been established by the world-building elements of the discourse, how does that text-world evolve and progress? What kinds of textual features cause a text-world to advance and in what ways? This chapter is particularly concerned with how we conceptualise the actions, events and other processes described in a discourse. The relationships which exist between these discourse elements and the background of world-builders against which they take place are also explored. Three different reports of a football match taken from three contrasting sources are examined here in order to demonstrate the basic mechanics by which text-worlds evolve. These analyses also investigate how the manner in which an action is described in the discourse-world can affect the participants' perception of the relationships between enactors in the text-world. The range of possible language choices available to the reports' varying speakers and writers are compared and the effects of their final selections on the overall texture of the text-world are discussed. This chapter also explores how the text-worlds related to different genres of discourse advance in distinct ways.

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In Chapter 3 we saw how some texts require multiple mental representations to be constructed in the minds of the discourse participants. The world-switches created by alternations in the deictic parameters of a text-world were considered in an introductory analysis of the shifts in time and space contained within an extract of literary narrative. This chapter examines multiple world-creation in more detail and looks in particular at the conceptual processes which enable us to manage several text-worlds in our minds at once. The relationship between the discourse-world and the text-world is also revisited over the coming pages. Specifically, the conceptual status of the different entities which populate these worlds is explored through contrasting analyses of the text-worlds constructed by a parenting manual and those constructed in an extract of literary fiction. Of central interest in this discussion are the processes by which participants assess the reliability of their co-communicators in the discourse-world, and how this assessment subsequently impacts upon their perception of the text-world. This chapter investigates the boundaries which exist between worlds and the ability certain entities have to transcend them.

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This is the final chapter in this book to explain a specific aspect of the Text World Theory framework, before Chapter 10 moves on to explore some of the directions the text-world approach to discourse study as a whole might take in the future. The discussion in the present chapter concerns the conceptualisation of a particular linguistic and cognitive phenomenon: metaphor. Metaphor has received an enormous amount of attention from cognitive linguists and psychologists in recent years. Indeed, a new understanding of the conceptual properties of metaphor was the main driving force behind the cognitive revolution in linguistics from the 1980s onwards. This chapter begins with a summary of some of the most recent theories of metaphor to emerge from Cognitive Linguistics, alongside some typical single-sentence examples of how metaphor is processed in the mind. However, Text World Theory's encompassing and discourse-focused approach means that the extension of metaphor through longer texts, and sometimes throughout entire discourses, is of greater interest to text-world theorists. This phenomenon is examined in the later sections of the chapter. Poetry provides some obvious and useful examples on which to base an initial discussion of metaphor, though both literary and non-literary texts are analysed here. The chapter also includes an exploration of metaphorical constructions in non-literary discourse, and a range of examples of the same sort of lonely-hearts advertisements with which this book opened is examined.

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This chapter explores the text-worlds created by a range of expressions of attitude in discourse. Over the course of the next few chapters, the processes by which readers and hearers conceptualise the varying attitudes of writers and speakers will be examined in relation to a wide range of texts. To begin, this chapter looks at the ways in which wishes, wants and desires are communicated in the discourse-world and the nature of the resulting text-worlds their expression creates. The glamorous fantasy worlds contained in an interview from a best-selling celebrity magazine are analysed in order to explore the discourse features which generate them in more detail. The chapter also investigates the text-worlds which result from expressions of obligation or duty in discourse and the persuasive effects such language often has on its recipients in the discourse-world. Some extracts from a car-owner's manual and from a magazine advice column are examined here and the fine line between different types of attitudes and their associated text-worlds is explored. The ontological boundaries and varying conceptual distances between discourse-worlds and their related text-worlds continue to be of interest over the coming pages.

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Text World Theory begins its exploration of communication and the mind at the immediate level of discourse production and reception. In keeping with its cognitivist principles, it attributes primacy to the human experience of language and takes the face-to-face interaction between living, thinking human beings as the prototype for all other aspects of communication and cognition. The content of this interactivity, as well as the context surrounding it, is the subject matter of the discourse-world level of Text World Theory. This chapter examines the associated elements which make up a discourse-world: from the expectations and constraints which govern communicative behaviour, to the cultural and personal knowledge structures which influence our linguistic and conceptual choices. Of particular interest here are the notion of communication as a fundamentally wilful endeavour, the processes by which human beings make inference from particular discourses, and the principles by which the impact of context on a discourse can be systematically examined and understood. These subjects are investigated in relation to an example of a face-to-face conversation and a newspaper obituary in order to explore how the contextual and conceptual factors involved in the processing of language vary in accordance with the type of communicative situation.