none Media Communication and Language Use: A Critical Discourse Analysis of News on Politics

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Abstract

For about six decades ago, there has been a shift of focus from the formal study of language (alone) to relating contexts to the study and description of language. The reason behind this is that language cannot exist on its own and be meaningful unless we relate its study to social practices. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA henceforth) with Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (3-D Model) of CDA is used for the analysis of the selected news on politics. Fairclough’s three-dimensional approach to CDA sees a text as a communication medium comprising three interrelated activities viz description, interpretation and explanation. Description is the identification of the formal features of a text. Interpretation identifies the relationship between the formal features of the text and interaction by considering the experiential, relational and expressive functions of the identified linguistic features in the text. Explanation which is the last stage is concerned with the relationship between interaction and the social practices, that is, it focuses on how the societal beliefs shape the use of language in communication. The findings of this study show that news broadcasters inform people of pressing issues, attract their attention in the course of communication, and state facts and reinforce the stated information in the mind of the listeners or readers through the use of a well organised and manipulated form of language. Based on the above premise, it could be said that social conditions and episodes that people encounter at a particular time influence their use of language and it varies from one profession to another.