In this final section, we return to some issues raised at several points (notably Sections 4.3 – 4.5) concerning the ways in which lexis serves to mark evaluative elements in discourse and to encode the viewpoint and attitude a speaker or writer adopts towards a topic. The observation
Lexis and discourse 109 that language is a ‘loaded weapon’ and can be used for persuasive and exploitative purposes is a not uncommon one (see especially Bolinger, 1980); but there have been a number of studies recently which have sought a more systematic account of the relationship between language and ideology (e.g. Fowler et al., 1979; 1991; Kress and Hodge, 1993) arguing that ideological systems exist in and are articulated through language and can, therefore, be retrieved by language analysis. The main advances in such analysis have been in the area of syntax, and these have shown the ways in which syntactic processes are employed to mediate the world from a specific point of view.
The term ideology is often used to mean ‘false or distorted consciousness’ but it is used for the discussion here to refer to a theory or system of beliefs which has come to be constructed as a way of com-prehending the world. Ideology impregnates a society’s ways of thinking, speaking, experiencing and behaving. It cannot be removed, only replaced by an alternative ideology. Thus, a choice of words or of one syntactic construction instead of another will function not just in a vacuum but to articulate ideology. Fowler et al. (1979) and Fowler (1991) study the particular roles of nominalization, passivization (especially agent-deletion) and transitivity in newspaper reports, and attempt to demonstrate how a consistent linguistic structuring of events is likely to encode the power structure and political position represented or favoured by the newspaper.
In the case of vocabulary, discussion of such issues has been more impressionistic, restricted in particular by the less advanced nature of lexicological analysis. It is relatively easy, however, to demonstrate how vocabulary choices are crucial to the expression of a viewpoint which extends beyond personal attitudinal marking (the focus of Sections 4.3 – 4.5) towards a more sociopolitical position. For example, the well-known example of freedom-fighter versus terrorist illustrates how lexical items can articulate opposing viewpoints but retain the same referential identity. A not dissimilar representation occurs in the reference in different newspapers to the prime minister of Great Britain in 1998 (Mr Tony Blair) as Tony, Mr Blair, Blair, The Prime Minister; and the alternative modes of address used by and about women (Mrs, Ms, Miss) encode different ideological viewpoints concerning the social and sexual
‘position’ of women. Sometimes expression of social and political attitudes can be more or less overt as in:
the £375,000-a-year water-company boss the self-styled liberator of the coal miners
110 Lexis and discourse
‘Self-styled’ here is an explicit evaluative marking, while the reference to the large salary requires interpretation on the part of the decoder.
Sometimes ideological presuppositions require unravelling with reference to the semantics of particular verb-types; for example:
The Prime Minister explained that the disclosure was necessary.
The Leader of the Opposition claimed that the disclosure was unnecessary.
In this example, the factivity of explain allows reference to the presup-posed truth of the subsequent statement; this is not the case with claim which does not encode access to truth. Newspaper reports regularly allow ideological positions to be signalled in this way, although they would doubtless not wish them to be unmasked. It is precisely such a task of unmasking ideologies and pointing up alternatives that Fowler et al.
(1979) envisage for what they term ‘linguistic criticism’. In fact, Fowler (1982a) argues that ‘linguistic criticism’ should replace literary criticism, abolishing distinctions between literary texts and other kinds of texts and allowing a pedagogical focus on the uses of style for expressing or concealing sociopolitical viewpoints. Fowler (1982b) has also been instrumental in developing analysis of the relationship between lexis and ideology, drawing in particular on work by Michael Halliday on ‘anti-languages’ (Halliday, 1978).
The term ‘anti-language’ is used by Halliday to refer to the development of extreme social dialects by language users such as criminals or political terrorists who exist in an oppositional relationship to the norms and ideology of the dominant culture. The anti-language created by such groups takes many forms, although Halliday points out that lexical transformations are the most visibly and obviously open to study. The lexical features of anti-language result from two main processes: relexicalization and overlexicalization. The former refers to the provision of new lexical items for the new concepts developed by each oppositional group. The latter refers to the development of alternative lexical items for those domains of the counter-culture which are of especial ideological significance. Fowler (1982a) examines the use of invented anti-languages and their attendant lexicalizations in the world of criminal anti-heroes in Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, noting in relation to a range of texts that relexicalization can involve the creation of a dialectical semantics, a reversal of the normal meanings of words so that in criminal slang upright man might mean
‘leader of a gang of criminals’ and law might mean ‘crime’.
Lexis and discourse 111 Overlexicalization also refers to the development of a specialized technological lexicon and to the jargons developed by subgroups within a society and need not automatically exist in opposition to socially dominant norms. In fact, overlexicalization is a process which works to semanticize areas deemed by society to be of taboo status and which are, therefore, often of obsessive concern. There is a corresponding and widely known overlexicalization of items which refer to sexual inter-course or to death; and there is specialization of lexical items for homo-sexuals and old people. In this connection, standardized reference itself sometimes develops overlexicalized avoidance strategies where what are also commonly known as euphemisms cloak direct use even of the more generally sanctioned terms; for example, a homosexual lover is referred to as a friend, associate or companion, and old people are referred to as the aged, elders, OAPs, geriatrics, seniors, senior citizens, over 60s, pen-sioners, Darby and Joan, etc. This kind of lexicalization is not an ‘anti-language’ as such but it operates to identify ideologically sensitive areas of societal discourse. We should also note in this connection the many and widely codified ways in which ‘man-made’ language structures a male-dominated world (e.g. ‘mankind’, ‘odd-man-out’, ‘man hours’,
‘manhandle’, etc.), or the ways in which direct reference to a nuclear bomb is avoided by selection from an overlexicalized and suitably anaesthetized range of items (e.g. missile, device, vehicle, arsenal, weap-onry). (See Montgomery, 1986, Ch. 10 for fuller discussion of social representation through lexis.)
An illustration of the role of lexis in the construction of ideology in newspaper reports can be provided by the extract from The Daily Mail (8 October 1983) in Figure 4.1. The report, describing the then leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, is not neutral, and the lexis used is perceptibly non-core in many places. It is also often attitudinally marked in such a way as to encode the ideological position of the political editor and, presumably, the newspaper for which he is writing. We are clearly not at a stage where a systematic analysis of lexicalization and ideology in discourse can be offered. Instead, a number of observations and questions offer ‘linguistic-critical’ insights into the passage and may also provide a basis for subsequent methodological development.
Attitudinal marking of lexis in this passage is pervasive. This ranges from non-core items such as swamp, (argument) boiling, nightmare question, posing, ducking, novice leader, frantically buttonholing, nail and razzmataz to more text-specific evaluation in which lexical items which are generally neutral in the abstract lexicon are negotiated into assuming negative connotations: for example, youngest leader at 41, young Mr Kinnock, trendy new leader, new beginning, novice leader. Structural
112 Lexis and discourse
Lexis and discourse 113 semantic patterning also assists such a process: for example, novice leader/veteran Left Winger; youngest leader/old party/new beginning (with old doing here a double semantic duty by contrasting with young and new). An ideological position is also signalled by devices such as switches in formality, for example:
His induction to the mantle of leadership began with a soaking on Brighton beach.
Here the transition from formal to informal lexis parallels, in an almost comic burlesque, the action of Kinnock’s momentary loss of dignity, but it also deliberately undercuts any pretension to serious leadership on the part of Kinnock. Repetition also plays its part in reinforcing key content:
for example, lose the last election/lose the next one (where a structural semantic pattern again reinforces and foregrounds the message). And the morphological root repetition—mantle of leadership/ dismantle—may be an even more subtle underlining of irresponsibility, especially when framed by the question:
How far are you going to dismantle Britain’s nuclear defence shield?
which cleverly presupposes that a decision to dismantle has already been taken by the Labour leader. Other comparably subtle (as it were, poetic) parallelisms are provided by phonological associations; for example, ‘a soaking on the beach…a snub by the Left’ and the juxtaposition (reinforced by typography) of ‘Canute’ and ‘Kinnock’. There is also a sustained metaphor in the idea of Canute being unable to resist a ‘rising tide’/‘party tide’ which threatens not only a ‘ducking’ but also to
‘swamp’ him. And discussion would not be complete without reference to the ideological distancing brought about by the use of disassociating quotation marks in ‘dream ticket’.
Fuller analysis would also need to take account of the selection of certain syntactic processes which encode an ideological position of opposition to Mr Kinnock and to the events of his election as Labour Party leader. One example, but probably chief among them, would be the attribution of insight to an abstract non-human entity in: ‘An angry session of the National Executive… It saw…’ which subtly removes the need for attribution to, or attestation by, anyone who might have been there to corroborate these ‘facts’. And fuller semantic analysis of the passage would also need to take account of the way lexically cohesive items cluster in a semantic set associated with problems and questions to which answers are either not forthcoming or are inadequate. However,
114 Lexis and discourse
what this discussion does demonstrate, is that lexis can be both overt and instrumental in signalling ideology and that some of its more interesting functions can be located in the discourse of news reports.
There is further discussion of lexicalization and ideology in Section 5.9 with particular reference to the study of literary texts and in Section 9.1 where the importance of a stylistic overlay to the meaning of words and of ideological representation is examined in relation to lexicographic practice. Carter and Nash (1990) and Fairclough (1995) also contain much relevant material.
4.11 Conclusion
This chapter demonstrates the extent of research still needed to provide adequate and replicable analyses of the part played by lexis in spoken and written discourse. As a level of language analysis, discourse analysis is itself at relatively formative stages; but I have discussed some features of lexical behaviour which show how important lexical patterns are in discourse organization. The underdevelopment of analysis and application in this domain is reflected by the way in which the subsequent chapters in this book discuss pedagogic and other applications which relate more directly to the bases provided in the previous three chapters than to any foundations laid here. However, applications of insights in this chapter to vocabulary teaching, in particular, are discussed in Chapter 7; and reports of lexicographic work for the COBUILD project at 6.6.1 indicate that some foreign learners’ dictionaries aim to draw more extensively and systematically on insights into the role of lexis in discourse.
Notes
1 Stubbs (1983, pp. 77–82) refers to such items as ‘pragmatic connectors’ and offers a wide-ranging discussion of their discourse functions. See also Schiffrin (1988).
2 ‘Ownerless’ nouns are an interesting class. They include items such as fact or issue, which are not associated with a particular writer or source. Their meanings do not normally carry evaluative or attitudinal marking.
3 We should note in this connection that syntax and intonation also signal marked acceptance of the proposition; but that in a three-part exchange the third slot open to speaker A allows for agreement by synonym, normally one involving a process of intensification; for example:
A: It’s cold
B: Yes, it is cold, isn’t it?
A: Mm. Freezing
Lexis and discourse 115 4 The examples here are similar to that cited by Van Dijk (1985a):
This morning I had a toothache.
I went to the dentist.
The dentist has a big car.
The car was bought in New York.
New York has serious financial troubles.
Here there is cohesion by lexical repetition and by membership of lexical set (toothache/dentist) but the text lacks a coherent global organization. See also Petöfi (1985).