Aligning language to ideology

A socio-semantic analysis of communist and democratic mass media language in Bulgaria

Bibliographic Data

ID6084338
AuthorsAnastasia Smirnova (0000-0001-5071-7569)
Year2015
Volume14
Issue2
Pages205-232
Publication date2015-08-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Language and Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1569-2159 • E-ISSN: 1569-9862
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/jlp.14.2.02smi
OpenAlexW1885581032
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited49

This paper compares and analyzes mass media language in Bulgaria before and after the breakdown of the communist regime with the goal to reveal the effect of political setting, communist vs. democratic, on the form of public discourse in the media. The comparison reveals statistically significant differences in the types of grammatical constructions used in the communist and democratic media (active vs. passive), as well as differences in grammatical properties of nouns (animacy, concreteness, and properness) and verbs (tense and evidentiality). I propose that the observed differences are best explained within a sociocognitive model of context proposed byvan Dijk (2008). From this perspective, linguistic characteristics of the democratic and communist discourse examined in the paper reflect speakers’ shared beliefs about the system of social meanings and fundamental principles of their respective societies, such as humanism vs. institutionalism, individualism vs. collectivism, and the differences in the perception of time

Collectivism · Communism · Context (archaeology · Democracy · Ideology · Individualism · Linguistics · Noun · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · History · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub