Chapter 1 1 Towards a Diachronic, Functional Account of Language in Context
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Chapter 1 1 Towards a diachronic, functional account of language in context “Our sense of the past, and our sense of the ways in which the past impinges on us today, become increasingly dependent on an ever expanding reservoir of mediated symbolic forms.” (Thompson, 1995: 34) “The context of a written text of the past is more complex, and more difficult to evaluate and make abstraction from, than that of a contemporary spoken language text.” (Halliday, 1959: 13) 1.1 Introduction to the thesis This thesis presents an investigation of the diachronic construction of meaning in news reports about the events that mark the end of conflict, focusing on seven overseas wars in which Australian military personnel have been involved, and making a case study of the reporting in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH or the Herald). The quotations used to introduce this chapter reflect the dual motivations for this study: an interest in texts that construe the social contexts of the past and what they indicate to us in the present about our language and our culture; and an interest in exploring changes in context within a particular register of English and how this can be managed using current linguistic models. The reporting of war always seems to capture the attention of the general public and generate a large volume of material, not to mention generate higher commercial value than ordinary news (see e.g. Read, 1999). For example, on the 21st March 2003, the first day of reporting after the beginning of the War on Iraq, the news of the outbreak of war occupied the first eight pages of the 24-page main section of the Sydney Morning Herald. This news appeared on the day before a general election in the state of New South Wales (of which Sydney is the capital), and only three pages of the main ‘news’ section were devoted to covering the election campaign, although there was also a 12-page lift-out section about it. Wars are “quintessentially newsworthy” (Cottle, 2006: 76) in terms of so-called ‘news values’, the kinds of criteria that are said to make some events more newsworthy than others (e.g. Bell, 1991; Brighton & Foy, 2007; Galtung & Ruge, 1965). They involve meanings about tragedy, destruction, heroism, power, serendipity, deception, sacrifice, and other extremes of the human condition, and seem to hold a morbid fascination for us. 1 Chapter 1 At the end of war, armistice carries both a legalistic gravity, as seen in the solemnity of truce-signing ceremonies, and a communal sense of relief and hope, as demonstrated by the crowds of people who flooded into Sydney to celebrate the cessation of the first and second world wars. At the point of armistice, the physical battle might come to an end but other battles, often metaphorical or ideological ones, are brought into focus as a result of the war itself. The discourse of armistice therefore potentially embodies discourses of recrimination, repatriation, reparations, estimations of the economic, structural and human cost of engaging in war, and prognostications about the future of peace. These discourses are often refracted through a range of salient social voices – government and military, for example – as they present their institutionally aligned response to the end of conflict. In working with this site for study, the research is therefore interdisciplinary in nature. As well as being a primarily linguistic enquiry, it is also an investigation of culture in history, insofar as the linguistic investigation can shed light on historical context. It is a study of the culture of interaction between the Herald as an institution and the people of Sydney as its readers, and the cultural history of how Sydneysiders1 have experienced war and armistice through the media. Thus, as far as culture is a major part of the context of a text, this investigation crucially addresses the problem of describing, and ascribing relevance to, contextual variables in a diachronic set of texts. 1.1.1 Objectives of the thesis The thesis has two broad aims: 1. to investigate the linguistic notion of register diachronically, and 2. to investigate historical changes in public meaning-making in relation to the end of war and thereby increase understanding of the changing character of SMH journalism as a semiotic activity. In this introductory chapter, I will first outline the scope of the thesis, including: introducing the Sydney Morning Herald as an institution and site for the linguistic investigation (section 1.2); introducing the approach to language and context taken in this thesis (section 1.3); and introducing the issues from the disciplines of media studies and media history that are relevant to the objectives of this study (section 1.4). In section 1.5 I will summarise the questions to be addressed in the thesis, and then section 3 will provide an overview of the thesis structure. Finally, section 1.7 will conclude the chapter. 1 ‘Sydneysiders’ refers to people who call Sydney home. Chapter 1 2 1.2 Introduction to the data The data in this study are reports from The Sydney Morning Herald2 (henceforth referred to also as SMH or the Herald) that cover seven major wars in Australia’s history: Boer War (1899-1902), World War I (1914-1918), World War II (1939-1945), Korean War (1950- 1953), Vietnam War (1962-1975)3, Gulf War (1990-1991), and Iraq War (2003-)4. The period covered by the research comprises most of the latter half of European Australian history5, and coincides with the period following the Federation in 1901 of British colonies into one Australian nation. Perhaps as a result of this, the early wars (particularly World War I) have collected about them considerable lore and romanticism relating to the cementing of an Australian character and identity (see e.g. Williams, 1999 on the 'Anzac legend' and the growth of an Anzac 'cult') through a ‘baptism by fire’ (especially the Gallipoli landing on 25th April, 1915). Table 1-1 shows the name by which each text will be identified throughout the thesis, along with its date and main headline. The set of texts as a corpus will be introduced in more detail in chapter 3. It will be noted that the set of texts constitutes a very small corpus, but the value of using a small corpus is that it allows for much more detailed analysis and description than a large corpus within the time restrictions of the research. 2 Sydney Morning Herald material published after 1959 (i.e less than 50 years old) is the copyright of Fairfax Media. The reports and full page images for Vietnam War text (1975), Gulf War text (1991), and Iraq War text (2003) are reproduced in this thesis with permission from Fairfax Media. The earlier texts are now in the public domain. 3 These dates for the Vietnam War are as given by the Australian War Memorial (2001-2008d), as Australian personnel were involved from 1965-1972. The start of the Vietnam War is difficult to pinpoint, as I will explain in chapter 3. 4 There has not been an official end to the Iraq War at the time of writing. However, the ‘fall of Baghdad’ on 9th April, 2003, was largely construed as the end of a major phase of war, and various ritual closures to Australian involvement were performed during that year even though troops remained in the Middle East (Bromley, 2004: 225). 5 Australia was inhabited by the indigenous Aboriginal people alone until 1788 when it was formally colonised by Britain with the arrival of the First Fleet under the leadership of Captain Arthur Phillip. 3 Chapter 1 Text Name Date Main Headline 1 Boer War text 3rd June, 1902 DECLARATION OF PEACE 2 World War I (WWI) text 12th November, GERMANY SIGNS 1918 ARMISTICE 3 World War II (WWII) text 16th August, JAPAN CAPITULATES 1945 4 Korean War text 28th July, 1953 KOREAN TRUCE SIGNED 5 Vietnam War text 1st May, 1975 VIETCONG TAKE OVER 6 Gulf War text 1st March, 1991 THE WAR IS OVER 7 Iraq War text 10th April, 2003 BAGHDAD FALLS Table 1-1 Identification of text names, dates and headlines The Sydney Morning Herald is a broadsheet newspaper published in Sydney, Australia, since 1831, and it is unique in being the only Sydney newspaper to have published throughout the entire period under study (1902-2003). As well as being Australia’s longest running newspaper, the Herald is famously recognised as having been owned by the same family for nearly 150 years (actually 149 years, 10 months, and 2 days, according to Souter, 1991: v). John Fairfax and Charles Kemp purchased The Sydney Herald (as it was known for its first decade) in 1841, and it was continuously owned and managed by the Fairfax family until December 1990, when Warwick Fairfax, the great-grandson of the original owner John Fairfax, lost control of the company following financial mismanagement. The current parent company of the Herald, John Fairfax Holdings Limited, retains the name of the family who controlled it for so long. The institutional history of the Sydney Morning Herald will be described as part of the contextual description of each text in chapters 3 and 7, and wherever necessary over the course of the thesis. Although the study is focused on just one newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, I argue that some characteristics of the media in general can also be observed as far as they impact the practices of the SMH, and as far as the SMH reporting reflects the wider media environment (see chapter 3 for a further discussion of the media environment in relation to each text).