Meaning in the Media
Discourse, Controversy and Debate

Addresses the issue of what we should make of competing claims about meaning when debated in highly charged circumstances.

Alan Durant (Author)

9780521136402, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 March 2010

266 pages, 1 table
22.7 x 15 x 1.1 cm, 0.43 kg

'Meaning in the Media is that rare find: a work accessible to students and researchers whose clarity and readability will give linguistics the type of visibility it deserves in our meaning-suffused society. For scholars and students working in a number of fields, in law and beyond, it offers a common vocabulary and analytical model with which to tackle contested meaning.' Graeme Dinwoodie, Professor of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law, University of Oxford

Meaning in the Media addresses the issue of how we should respond to competing claims about meaning put forward in confrontations between people or organisations in highly charged circumstances such as bitter public controversies and expensive legal disputes. Alan Durant draws attention to the pervasiveness and significance of such meaning-related disputes in the media, investigating how their 'meaning' dimension is best described and explained. Through his analysis of deception, distortion, bias, false advertising, offensiveness and other kinds of communicative behaviour that trigger interpretive disputes, Durant shows that we can understand both meaning and media better if we focus in new ways on moments in discourse when the apparently continuous flow of understanding and agreement breaks down. This lively and contemporary volume will be invaluable to students and teachers of linguistics, media studies, journalism and law.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Communication Failure and Interpretive Conflict: 1. From personal disagreement to meaning troublespot
2. Signs of trouble
3. Different kinds of meaning question
Part II. Making Sense of 'Meaning': 4. Meaning and the appeal to semantics
5. Interpretive variation
6. Time-based meaning
Part III. Verbal Disputes and Approaches to Resolving Them: 7. Meaning as a knockout competition
8. Standards of interpretation
Part IV. Analysing Disputes in Different Fields of Law and Regulation: 9. Defamation: 'reasonably capable of bearing the meaning attributed'
10. Advertising: 'not only what is said, but what is reasonably implied'
11. Offensiveness: 'if there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable'
Part V. Conclusion: 12. Trust in interpretation
References.

Subject Areas: Media studies [JFD], Sociolinguistics [CFB]