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Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere
HAL 4

≥
Handbooks of Applied Linguistics
Communication Competence
Language and Communication Problems
Practical Solutions

Editors
Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

Volume 4

Mouton de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Handbook of
Communication in
the Public Sphere

Edited by
Ruth Wodak and Veronika Koller

Mouton de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.

앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Handbook of communication in the public sphere / edited by Ruth

Wodak and Veronika Koller.
p. cm. ⫺ (Handbooks of applied linguistics ; 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-11-018832-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Communication. 2. Language and languages. 3. Critical dis-
course analysis. I. Wodak, Ruth, 1950⫺ II. Koller, Veronika,
1973⫺
P91.H363 2008
302.2⫺dc22
2008004613

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN 978-3-11-018832-5

쑔 Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin.
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-
copy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher.
Cover design: Martin Zech, Bremen.
Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde.
Printing and binding: Hubert & Co., Göttingen.
Printed in Germany.
 Introduction to the handbook series v

Introduction to the handbook series

Linguistics for problem solving

Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

1. Science and application at the turn of the millennium

The distinction between “pure” and “applied” sciences is an old one. Accord-
ing to Meinel (2000), it was introduced by the Swedish chemist Wallerius
in 1751, as part of the dispute of that time between the scholastic disciplines
and the then emerging epistemic sciences. However, although the concept of
“Applied Science” gained currency rapidly since that time, it has remained
problematic.
Until recently, the distinction between “pure” and “applied” mirrored the
distinction between “theory and “practice”. The latter ran all the way through
Western history of science since its beginnings in antique times. At first, it was
only philosophy that was regarded as a scholarly and, hence, theoretical disci-
pline. Later it was followed by other leading disciplines, as e.g., the sciences.
However, as academic disciplines, all of them remained theoretical. In fact, the
process of achieving independence of theory was essential for the academic dis-
ciplines to become independent from political, religious or other contingencies
and to establish themselves at universities and academies. This also implied a
process of emancipation from practical concerns – an at times painful develop-
ment which manifested (and occasionally still manifests) itself in the discredit-
ing of and disdain for practice and practitioners. To some, already the very
meaning of the notion “applied” carries a negative connotation, as is suggested
by the contrast between the widely used synonym for “theoretical”, i.e. “pure”
(as used, e.g. in the distinction between “Pure” and “Applied Mathematics”)
and its natural antonym “impure”. On a different level, a lower academic status
sometimes is attributed to applied disciplines because of their alleged lack of
originality – they are perceived as simply and one-directionally applying in-
sights gained in basic research and watering them down by neglecting the limit-
ing conditions under which these insights were achieved.
Today, however, the academic system is confronted with a new understand-
ing of science. In politics, in society and, above all, in economy a new concept
of science has gained acceptance which questions traditional views. In recent
philosophy of science, this is labelled as “science under the pressure to suc-
ceed” – i.e. as science whose theoretical structure and criteria of evaluation are
increasingly conditioned by the pressure of application (Carrier, Stöltzner, and
Wette 2004):
vi Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

Whenever the public is interested in a particular subject, e.g. when a new disease de-
velops that cannot be cured by conventional medication, the public requests science
to provide new insights in this area as quickly as possible. In doing so, the public is
less interested in whether these new insights fit seamlessly into an existing theoretical
framework, but rather whether they make new methods of treatment and curing poss-
ible. (Institut für Wirtschafts- und Technikforschung 2004, our translation).

With most of the practical problems like these, sciences cannot rely on know-
ledge that is already available, simply because such knowledge does not yet
exist. Very often, the problems at hand do not fit neatly into the theoretical
framework of one particular “pure science”, and there is competition among dis-
ciplines with respect to which one provides the best theoretical and methodo-
logical resources for potential solutions. And more often than not the problems
can be tackled only by adopting an interdisciplinary approach.
As a result, the traditional “Cascade Model”, where insights were applied
top-down from basic research to practice, no longer works in many cases. In-
stead, a kind of “application oriented basic research” is needed, where disci-
plines – conditioned by the pressure of application – take up a certain still dif-
fuse practical issue, define it as a problem against the background of their
respective theoretical and methodological paradigms, study this problem and
finally develop various application oriented suggestions for solutions. In this
sense, applied science, on the one hand, has to be conceived of as a scientific
strategy for problem solving – a strategy that starts from mundane practical
problems and ultimately aims at solving them. On the other hand, despite the
dominance of application that applied sciences are subjected to, as sciences they
can do nothing but develop such solutions in a theoretically reflected and me-
thodologically well founded manner. The latter, of course, may lead to the well-
known fact that even applied sciences often tend to concentrate on “application
oriented basic research” only and thus appear to lose sight of the original prac-
tical problem. But despite such shifts in focus: Both the boundaries between
disciplines and between pure and applied research are getting more and more
blurred.
Today, after the turn of the millennium, it is obvious that sciences are re-
quested to provide more and something different than just theory, basic research
or pure knowledge. Rather, sciences are increasingly being regarded as partners
in a more comprehensive social and economic context of problem solving and
are evaluated against expectations to be practically relevant. This also implies
that sciences are expected to be critical, reflecting their impact on society. This
new “applied” type of science is confronted with the question: Which role can
the sciences play in solving individual, interpersonal, social, intercultural,
political or technical problems? This question is typical of a conception of
science that was especially developed and propagated by the influential philos-
opher Sir Karl Popper – a conception that also this handbook series is based on.
 Introduction to the handbook series vii

2. “Applied Linguistics”: Concepts and controversies

The concept of “Applied Linguistics” is not as old as the notion of “Applied

Science”, but it has also been problematical in its relation to theoretical lin-
guistics since its beginning. There seems to be a widespread consensus that the
notion “Applied Linguistics” emerged in 1948 with the first issue of the journal
Language Learning which used this compound in its subtitle A Quarterly Jour-
nal of Applied Linguistics. This history of its origin certainly explains why even
today “Applied Linguistics” still tends to be predominantly associated with
foreign language teaching and learning in the Anglophone literature in particu-
lar, as can bee seen e.g. from Johnson and Johnson (1998), whose Encyclopedic
Dictionary of Applied Linguistics is explicitly subtitled A Handbook for Lan-
guage Teaching. However, this theory of origin is historically wrong. As is
pointed out by Back (1970), the concept of applying linguistics can be traced
back to the early 19th century in Europe, and the very notion “Applied Lin-
guistics” was used in the early 20th already.

2.1. Theoretically Applied vs. Practically Applied Linguistics

As with the relation between “Pure” and “Applied” sciences pointed out above,
also with “Applied Linguistics” the first question to be asked is what makes it
different from “Pure” or “Theoretical Linguistics”. It is not surprising, then, that
the terminologist Back takes this difference as the point of departure for his dis-
cussion of what constitutes “Applied Linguistics”. In the light of recent contro-
versies about this concept it is no doubt useful to remind us of his terminological
distinctions.
Back (1970) distinguishes between “Theoretical Linguistics” – which aims
at achieving knowledge for its own sake, without considering any other value –,
“Practice” – i.e. any kind of activity that serves to achieve any purpose in life in
the widest sense, apart from the striving for knowledge for its own sake – and
“Applied Linguistics”, as a being based on “Theoretical Linguistics” on the one
hand and as aiming at usability in “Practice” on the other. In addition, he makes
a difference between “Theoretical Applied Linguistics” and “Practical Applied
Linguistics”, which is of particular interest here. The former is defined as the use
of insights and methods of “Theoretical Linguistics” for gaining knowledge in
another, non-linguistic discipline, such as ethnology, sociology, law or literary
studies, the latter as the application of insights from linguistics in a practical
field related to language, such as language teaching, translation, and the like.
For Back, the contribution of applied linguistics is to be seen in the planning
of practical action. Language teaching, for example, is practical action done
by practitioners, and what applied linguistics can contribute to this is, e.g., to
provide contrastive descriptions of the languages involved as a foundation for
viii Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

teaching methods. These contrastive descriptions in turn have to be based on the

descriptive methods developed in theoretical linguistics.
However, in the light of the recent epistemological developments outlined
above, it may be useful to reinterpret Back’s notion of “Theoretically Applied
Linguistics”. As he himself points out, dealing with practical problems can have
repercussions on the development of the theoretical field. Often new ap-
proaches, new theoretical concepts and new methods are a prerequisite for deal-
ing with a particular type of practical problems, which may lead to an – at least
in the beginning – “application oriented basic research” in applied linguistics
itself, which with some justification could also be labelled “theoretically ap-
plied”, as many such problems require the transgression of disciplinary bound-
aries. It is not rare that a domain of “Theoretically Applied Linguistics” or “ap-
plication oriented basic research” takes on a life of its own, and that also
something which is labelled as “Applied Linguistics” might in fact be rather re-
mote from the mundane practical problems that originally initiated the respect-
ive subject area. But as long as a relation to the original practical problem can be
established, it may be justified to count a particular field or discussion as be-
longing to applied linguistics, even if only “theoretically applied”.

2.2. Applied linguistics as a response to structuralism and generativism

As mentioned before, in the Anglophone world in particular the view still
appears to be widespread that the primary concerns of the subject area of ap-
plied linguistics should be restricted to second language acquisition and lan-
guage instruction in the first place (see, e.g., Davies 1999 or Schmitt and Celce-
Murcia 2002). However, in other parts of the world, and above all in Europe,
there has been a development away from aspects of language learning to a wider
focus on more general issues of language and communication.
This broadening of scope was in part a reaction to the narrowing down the
focus in linguistics that resulted from self-imposed methodological constraints
which, as Ehlich (1999) points out, began with Saussurean structuralism and
culminated in generative linguistics. For almost three decades since the late
1950s, these developments made “language” in a comprehensive sense, as
related to the everyday experience of its users, vanish in favour of an idealised
and basically artificial entity. This led in “Core” or theoretical linguistics to a
neglect of almost all everyday problems with language and communication en-
countered by individuals and societies and made it necessary for those inter-
ested in socially accountable research into language and communication to draw
on a wider range of disciplines, thus giving rise to a flourishing of interdiscipli-
nary areas that have come to be referred to as hyphenated variants of linguistics,
such as sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, conversation
analysis, pragmatics, and so on (Davies and Elder 2004).
 Introduction to the handbook series ix

That these hyphenated variants of linguistics can be said to have originated

from dealing with problems may lead to the impression that they fall completely
into the scope of applied linguistics. This the more so as their original thematic
focus is in line with a frequently quoted definition of applied linguistics as “the
theoretical and empirical investigation of real world problems in which lan-
guage is a central issue” (Brumfit 1997: 93). However, in the recent past much
of the work done in these fields has itself been rather “theoretically applied” in
the sense introduced above and ultimately even become mainstream in lin-
guistics. Also, in view of the current epistemological developments that see all
sciences under the pressure of application, one might even wonder if there is
anything distinctive about applied linguistics at all.
Indeed it would be difficult if not impossible to delimit applied linguistics
with respect to the practical problems studied and the disciplinary approaches
used: Real-world problems with language (to which, for greater clarity, should
be added: “with communication”) are unlimited in principle. Also, many prob-
lems of this kind are unique and require quite different approaches. Some
might be tackled successfully by applying already available linguistic theo-
ries and methods. Others might require for their solution the development of
new methods and even new theories. Following a frequently used distinction
first proposed by Widdowson (1980), one might label these approaches
as “Linguistics Applied” or “Applied Linguistics”. In addition, language is
a trans-disciplinary subject par excellence, with the result that problems do not
come labelled and may require for their solution the cooperation of various dis-
ciplines.

2.3. Conceptualisations and communities

The questions of what should be its reference discipline and which themes,
areas of research and sub-disciplines it should deal with, have been discussed
constantly and were also the subject of an intensive debate (e.g. Seidlhofer
2003). In the recent past, a number of edited volumes on applied linguistics have
appeared which in their respective introductory chapters attempt at giving a
definition of “Applied Linguistics”. As can be seen from the existence of the
Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA) and its numerous
national affiliates, from the number of congresses held or books and journals
published with the label “Applied Linguistics”, applied linguistics appears to be
a well-established and flourishing enterprise. Therefore, the collective need felt
by authors and editors to introduce their publication with a definition of the sub-
ject area it is supposed to be about is astonishing at first sight. Quite obviously,
what Ehlich (2006) has termed “the struggle for the object of inquiry” appears to
be characteristic of linguistics – both of linguistics at large and applied lin-
guistics. Its seems then, that the meaning and scope of “Applied Linguistics”
x Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

cannot be taken for granted, and this is why a wide variety of controversial con-
ceptualisations exist.
For example, in addition to the dichotomy mentioned above with respect to
whether approaches to applied linguistics should in their theoretical foundations
and methods be autonomous from theoretical linguistics or not, and apart from
other controversies, there are diverging views on whether applied linguistics is
an independent academic discipline (e.g. Kaplan and Grabe 2000) or not (e.g.
Davies and Elder 2004), whether its scope should be mainly restricted to lan-
guage teaching related topics (e.g. Schmitt and Celce-Murcia 2002) or not (e.g.
Knapp 2006), or whether applied linguistics is a field of interdisciplinary syn-
thesis where theories with their own integrity develop in close interaction with
language users and professionals (e.g. Rampton 1997/2003) or whether this
view should be rejected, as a true interdisciplinary approach is ultimately im-
possible (e.g. Widdowson 2005).
In contrast to such controversies Candlin and Sarangi (2004) point out that
applied linguistics should be defined in the first place by the actions of those
who practically do applied linguistics:

[…] we see no especial purpose in reopening what has become a somewhat sterile
debate on what applied linguistics is, or whether it is a distinctive and coherent
discipline. […] we see applied linguistics as a many centered and interdisciplinary
endeavour whose coherence is achieved in purposeful, mediated action by its prac-
titioners. […]
What we want to ask of applied linguistics is less what it is and more what it does, or
rather what its practitioners do. (Candlin/Sarangi 2004:1–2)

Against this background, they see applied linguistics as less characterised

by its thematic scope – which indeed is hard to delimit – but rather by the
two aspects of “relevance” and “reflexivity”. Relevance refers to the purpose
applied linguistic activities have for the targeted audience and to the degree that
these activities in their collaborative practices meet the background and needs
of those addressed – which, as matter of comprehensibility, also includes taking
their conceptual and language level into account. Reflexivity means the contex-
tualisation of the intellectual principles and practices, which is at the core of
what characterises a professional community, and which is achieved by asking
leading questions like “What kinds of purposes underlie what is done?”, “Who
is involved in their determination?”, “By whom, and in what ways, is their
achievement appraised?”, “Who owns the outcomes?”.
We agree with these authors that applied linguistics in dealing with real
world problems is determined by disciplinary givens – such as e.g. theories,
methods or standards of linguistics or any other discipline – but that it is deter-
mined at least as much by the social and situational givens of the practices of
life. These do not only include the concrete practical problems themselves but
 Introduction to the handbook series xi

also the theoretical and methodological standards of cooperating experts from

other disciplines, as well as the conceptual and practical standards of the prac-
titioners who are confronted with the practical problems in the first place. Thus,
as Sarangi and van Leeuwen (2003) point out, applied linguists have to become
part of the respective “community of practice”.
If, however, applied linguists have to regard themselves as part of a commu-
nity of practice, it is obvious that it is the entire community which determines
what the respective subject matter is that the applied linguist deals with and
how. In particular, it is the respective community of practice which determines
which problems of the practitioners have to be considered. The consequence of
this is that applied linguistics can be understood from very comprehensive to
very specific, depending on what kind of problems are considered relevant by
the respective community. Of course, following this participative understanding
of applied linguistics also has consequences for the Handbooks of Applied Lin-
guistics both with respect to the subjects covered and the way they are theoreti-
cally and practically treated.

3. Applied linguistics for problem solving

Against this background, it seems reasonable not to define applied linguistics as

an autonomous discipline or even only to delimit it by specifying a set of sub-
jects it is supposed to study and typical disciplinary approaches it should use.
Rather, in line with the collaborative and participatory perspective of the com-
munities of practice applied linguists are involved in, this handbook series is
based on the assumption that applied linguistics is a specific, problem-oriented
way of “doing linguistics” related to the real-life world. In other words: applied
linguistics is conceived of here as “linguistics for problem solving”.
To outline what we think is distinctive about this area of inquiry: Entirely
in line with Popper’s conception of science, we take it that applied linguistics
starts from the assumption of an imperfect world in the areas of language and
communication. This means, firstly, that linguistic and communicative compet-
ence in individuals, like other forms of human knowledge, is fragmentary and
defective – if it exists at all. To express it more pointedly: Human linguistic and
communicative behaviour is not “perfect”. And on a different level, this imper-
fection also applies to the use and status of language and communication in and
among groups or societies.
Secondly, we take it that applied linguists are convinced that the imperfec-
tion both of individual linguistic and communicative behaviour and language
based relations between groups and societies can be clarified, understood and to
some extent resolved by their intervention, e.g. by means of education, training
or consultancy.
xii Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

Thirdly, we take it that applied linguistics proceeds by a specific mode of

inquiry in that it mediates between the way language and communication is ex-
pertly studied in the linguistic disciplines and the way it is directly experienced
in different domains of use. This implies that applied linguists are able to dem-
onstrate that their findings – be they of a “Linguistics Applied” or “Applied
Linguistics” nature – are not just “application oriented basic research” but can
be made relevant to the real-life world.
Fourthly, we take it that applied linguistics is socially accountable. To the
extent that the imperfections initiating applied linguistic activity involve both
social actors and social structures, we take it that applied linguistics has to
be critical and reflexive with respect to the results of its suggestions and solu-
tions.
These assumptions yield the following questions which at the same time de-
fine objectives for applied linguistics:
1. Which linguistic problems are typical of which areas of language compet-
ence and language use?
2. How can linguistics define and describe these problems?
3. How can linguistics suggest, develop, or achieve solutions of these prob-
lems?
4. Which solutions result in which improvements in speakers’ linguistic and
communicative abilities or in the use and status of languages in and between
groups?
5. What are additional effects of the linguistic intervention?

4. Objectives of this handbook series

These questions also determine the objectives of this book series. However, in
view of the present boom in handbooks of linguistics and applied linguistics,
one should ask what is specific about this series of nine thematically different
volumes.
To begin with, it is important to emphasise what it is not aiming at:
– The handbook series does not want to take a snapshot view or even a “hit
list” of fashionable topics, theories, debates or fields of study.
– Nor does it aim at a comprehensive coverage of linguistics because some
selectivity with regard to the subject areas is both inevitable in a book series
of this kind and part of its specific profile.
Instead, the book series will try
– to show that applied linguistics can offer a comprehensive, trustworthy and
scientifically well-founded understanding of a wide range of problems,
– to show that applied linguistics can provide or develop instruments for solv-
ing new, still unpredictable problems,
 Introduction to the handbook series xiii

– to show that applied linguistics is not confined to a restricted number of

topics such as, e.g. foreign language learning, but that it successfully deals
with a wide range of both everyday problems and areas of linguistics,
– to provide a state-of-the-art description of applied linguistics against the
background of the ability of this area of academic inquiry to provide de-
scriptions, analyses, explanations and, if possible, solutions of everyday
problems. On the one hand, this criterion is the link to trans-disciplinary co-
operation. On the other, it is crucial in assessing to what extent linguistics
can in fact be made relevant.
In short, it is by no means the intention of this series to duplicate the present
state of knowledge about linguistics as represented in other publications with
the supposed aim of providing a comprehensive survey. Rather, the intention is
to present the knowledge available in applied linguistics today firstly from an
explicitly problem solving perspective and secondly, in a non-technical, easily
comprehensible way. Also it is intended with this publication to build bridges to
neighbouring disciplines and to critically discuss which impact the solutions
discussed do in fact have on practice. This is particularly necessary in areas like
language teaching and learning – where for years there has been a tendency to
fashionable solutions without sufficient consideration of their actual impact on
the reality in schools.

5. Criteria for the selection of topics

Based on the arguments outlined above, the handbook series has the following
structure: Findings and applications of linguistics will be presented in concen-
tric circles, as it were, starting out from the communication competence of the
individual, proceeding via aspects of interpersonal and inter-group communi-
cation to technical communication and, ultimately, to the more general level of
society. Thus, the topics of the nine volumes are as follows:
1. Handbook of Individual Communication Competence
2. Handbook of Interpersonal Communication
3. Handbook of Communication in Organisations and Professions
4. Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere
5. Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication
6. Handbook of Foreign Language Communication and Learning
7. Handbook of Intercultural Communication
8. Handbook of Technical Communication
9. Handbook of Language and Communication: Diversity and Change
This thematic structure can be said to follow the sequence of experience with
problems related to language and communication a human passes through in the
xiv Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

course of his or her personal biographical development. This is why the topic
areas of applied linguistics are structured here in ever-increasing concentric
circles: in line with biographical development, the first circle starts with
the communicative competence of the individual and also includes interper-
sonal communication as belonging to a person’s private sphere. The second
circle proceeds to the everyday environment and includes the professional and
public sphere. The third circle extends to the experience of foreign languages
and cultures, which at least in officially monolingual societies, is not made by
everybody and if so, only later in life. Technical communication as the fourth
circle is even more exclusive and restricted to a more special professional clien-
tele. The final volume extends this process to focus on more general, supra-in-
dividual national and international issues.
For almost all of these topics, there already exist introductions, handbooks
or other types of survey literature. However, what makes the present volumes
unique is their explicit claim to focus on topics in language and communication
as areas of everyday problems and their emphasis on pointing out the relevance
of applied linguistics in dealing with them.

Bibliography

Back, Otto
1970 Was bedeutet und was bezeichnet der Begriff ‘angewandte Sprachwissen-
schaft’? Die Sprache 16: 21–53.
Brumfit, Christopher
1997 How applied linguistics is the same as any other science. International
Journal of Applied Linguistics 7(1): 86–94.
Candlin, Chris N. and Srikant Sarangi
2004 Making applied linguistics matter. Journal of Applied Linguistics 1(1): 1–8.
Carrier, Michael, Martin Stöltzner, and Jeanette Wette
2004 Theorienstruktur und Beurteilungsmaßstäbe unter den Bedingungen der
Anwendungsdominanz. Universität Bielefeld: Institut für Wissenschafts-
und Technikforschung [http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/iwt/projekte/wissen/
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xvi Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
Acknowledgements
Comprehensive volumes take a long time to prepare, edit, and finish.
We would like to thank Gerd Antos and Karlfried Knapp for their help
throughout this difficult process. Moreover, we are very grateful to Barbara
Karlson and Wolfgang Konwitschny, de Gruyter Publishers, for their continu-
ous support and feedback. Brian Walker edited and revised the manuscript very
well indeed and helped us greatly with the index. Finally, we would like to thank
all our contributors for their excellent cooperation and their patience.

February 2008 Ruth Wodak

Veronika Koller
Contents
Introduction to the handbook series
Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres
Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

I. Theoretical foundations

1. Language, communication and the public sphere: Definitions

Scott Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2. Public space, common goods, and private interests: Emergent
definitions in globally mediated humanity
Phil Graham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3. Media discourse and the naturalisation of categories
Nick Couldry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
4. Language, communication and the public sphere: A perspective
from feminist critical discourse analysis
Michelle M. Lazar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

II. Language and communication in business

5. Advertisements and Public Relations

Guy Cook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
6. Language and communication design in the marketplace
Gerlinde Mautner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
7. Identity, image, impression: Corporate self-promotion and
public reactions
Veronika Koller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
8. Creating a “green” image in the public sphere: Corporate
environmental reports in a genre perspective
Aud Solbjørg Skulstad. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
9. Britain™ and “corporate” national identity
Lidia De Michelis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
xx Contents

III. Language and communication in politics

10. Political terminology

Paul A. Chilton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
11. Rhetoric of political speeches
Martin Reisigl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
12. Dissemination and implementation of political concepts
Florian Oberhuber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
13. The contribution of critical linguistics to the analysis of
discriminatory prejudices and stereotypes in the language of politics
Ruth Wodak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
14. Tabloidisation of political communication in the public sphere
Werner Holly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

IV. Language and communication in the media

15. News genres

Theo van Leeuwen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
16. Specific genre features of new mass media
Helmut Gruber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
17. Specific debate formats of mass media
Kay Richardson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
18. The sounds of silence in the media: Censorship and self-censorship
Christine Anthonissen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
19. Technology, democracy and participation in space
Rodney H. Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

Biographical notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453
Introduction: Shifting boundaries and
emergent public spheres
Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak

1. The emergent public sphere – defining the

concept of ‘public sphere’

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, we witnessed a growing academic inter-
est in the issue of the public sphere. Significantly fostered by the first English
translation of Jürgen Habermas’ book Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere (Habermas 1989/1996), research on the public sphere has provided a
variety of theoretical approaches which either postulated the imminent demise
of the public sphere in (late) modern democracies (Calhoun 1992; Crossley and
Roberts 2004) or related the evident crisis of the (national) public sphere(s) to
the growth of global tendencies rooted in the emergent trans-nationalisation of
media production and reception (Fraser 2003) (see Schulz-Forberg 2005 for an
extensive discussion).
What is a public sphere? The public sphere is a concept in Continental phi-
losophy and critical theory that contrasts with the private sphere, and is that part
of life in which one interacts with others and with society at large. In Civil
Society and the Political Public Sphere, Habermas (1992) defines the public
sphere as “a network for communicating information and points of view” which
eventually transforms them into a public opinion.
The contemporary debate about the public sphere is characterised by voices
claiming authority on the definition of what might constitute a/the public sphere.
For many, the public sphere is a political one, which enables citizens to partici-
pate in democratic dialogue. For others, the public sphere is found in the media.
In the field of theory, late modernists (Garnham 1986; Weintraub and Kumar
1997), postmodernists (Villa 1992; Fraser 1995), feminists (Siltanen and Stan-
worth 1984), and others have marked their terrain within the debate, which
began – as mentioned above – with Jürgen Habermas in 1962. In Strukturwandel
der Öffentlichkeit (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), he believed
to have found a time and space in which a true public sphere – true to his defi-
nition of it – existed and thrived. The German term Öffentlichkeit (public sphere)
encompasses a variety of meanings, implying as a spatial concept the social sites
or arenas where meanings are articulated, distributed and negotiated. “Public
sphere” also denotes the collective body constituted by this process, i.e. “the
public” (Negt and Kluge 1993).
The public sphere denotes specific institutions, agencies, practices; how-
2 Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak

ever, it is also a general social horizon of experience integrating everything that

is actually or seemingly relevant for all members of society. Understood in this
sense, the public sphere is a matter for a handful of professionals (e.g., politi-
cians, editors, union officials) on the one hand, but, on the other, it is something
that concerns everyone and that realises itself only in people’s minds, in a di-
mension of their consciousness (Negt and Kluge 1993).
Viewed historically, Habermas suggests that in the late eighteenth and nine-
teenth century in Germany, France, and Britain, for a short period of time only,
an effective bourgeois public sphere had emerged. Large numbers of middle
class men (!), i.e. private individuals, came together and engaged in reasoned
argument over key issues of mutual interest and concern, creating a space in
which both new ideas and the practices and discipline of rational public debate
were cultivated (Habermas 1962). Habermas thus formulated an ideal-type
Western approach, which reconfirmed the classic construction of European his-
tory in which the Enlightenment features as a key period for the constitution of
social and moral values and practices in which many Europeans still believe
and on which they build societies even today. This interpretation of history re-
mains an ideal type, however. The values are surely partial to the discourse and
self-understanding of Europe and its population and states, not to other parts of
the world. Habermas was convinced that an independent reason almost forced
the interlocutors in the public sphere to find a consensus based on the most ac-
ceptable and logical argument: “Public debate was supposed to transform vol-
untas into a ratio that in the public competition of private arguments came into
being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of
all” (Habermas 1989/1996: 83).
Forty years after Habermas’ first contribution, the understanding of the pub-
lic sphere has changed drastically as will become visible throughout this volume
(see also Wright, this volume). Habermas developed an ideal type of a white and
male middle-class community that has no reverberations in today’s social struc-
tures and communicative behaviour. In general, “Habermas (…) seems too sat-
isfied with a narrow perspective through which to explore the public sphere,
namely that of the bourgeoisie” (Crossley and Roberts 2004: 11). Moreover,
critics have accused Habermas of having bought into the “dumbing down” ef-
fect of the media that Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer had proclaimed
in the 1950s. However, Habermas’ explanations for the disappearance of the
traditional public sphere are to a certain extent convincing when he claims that
public opinion today is more and more thought of as the result of an opinion poll
which politicians use and seek to manipulate for their own ends.
Before sketching very briefly three main developments in public sphere the-
ory, it should be mentioned that Habermas was prominent among his critics
himself (Habermas 1992). The highly idealised “rational dialogue” between
citizens, and between citizens and the state, was later replaced by systemic and
 Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres 3

strategic exchanges of power in his model (Ingram 1994). Legitimacy is negoti-

ated and citizens offer this legitimacy to the state in return for the benefits of the
welfare state (Habermas 1988). However, Habermas is convinced that ever
more areas of social life are bureaucratised and commodified while communi-
cative engagement and reasoning within them is undermined, open dialogue re-
placed by bureaucratic procedures and economic transactions (see also Fair-
clough’s concepts of marketisation and commodification which draw on
Habermas; Fairclough 1992). Habermas did, however, continue to disentangle
reason from discourse. That is to say that objective reasoning, i.e. critique and
reflection on the status quo, remains a positive force for him that is not a form of
rational domination by discourse as a negative force (Habermas 1988). In this
scenario, even the representative ruler of a country, in the case of the Enlighten-
ment the French king, could have theoretically joined the group of the “reason-
ing” would he have sat at the doorstep of a café and joined the world of objective
argument.

2. Three theories of the public sphere

Criticism of Habermas led to three main trends in public sphere research

(Schulz-Forberg 2005): a late-modern school, a postmodern school and a re-
lational school (Crossley and Roberts 2004). The first one builds on Habermas
by accepting Habermasian prerequisites such as general accessibility to in-
formation, eradication of privilege, the quest for truth and the quest for general
norms, along with their rational legitimisation (Koopmans and Erbe 2004).
While this public sphere rests on normative foundations, these norms do not
apply to white middle-class men exclusively. A critical division of social con-
cepts is introduced here: the “system” and the “lifeworld”, which has become
very important in sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis (see Wodak
1996). The modern world falls into these two categories and the public sphere,
i.e. communication between people through language and representation, be-
longs to the lifeworld and not to the system.
The postmodern school, on the other hand, opens up the public sphere to
plurality. Instead of one consensus-driven public sphere, many so-called subal-
tern counter-publics exist: Parallel discursive arenas where members of sub-
ordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses. Reason can
thus be broken down into a myriad of practical and habitual modes of regulating
public dialogue. Nancy Fraser (1995: 295) formulated three characteristics of a
postmodern conception of the public sphere:
1) it must acknowledge that participatory parity [is] not merely the bracketing, but
rather the elimination, of systematic social inequalities; 2) where such inequality
persists, however, a postmodern multiplicity of mutually contesting publics is pre-
4 Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak

ferable to a single modern public sphere oriented solely to deliberation; 3) a post-

modern conception of the public sphere must countenance not the exclusion, but the
inclusion, of interests and issues that bourgeois masculinist ideology labels “private”
and treats as inadmissible.
For the relational or institutional school, as it is sometimes called, the public
sphere manifests itself in historical milieux and within wider social relations.
Relational and institutional settings are defined as a “patterned matrix of insti-
tutional relationships among cultural, economic, social, and political practices”
(Somers 1993). The public sphere is one of those relational or institutional are-
nas. The public sphere is furthermore “a contested participatory site in which
actors with overlapping identities as legal subjects, citizens, economic actors,
and family and community members, form a public body and emerge in negotia-
tions and contestations over political and social life.” From this point of view
the theoretical development began to yield increasingly dialogical approaches,
but not in the sense of the Habermasian rational dialogue, rather in the sense of
Bakhtin’s participatory dialogue, heteroglossia, and the semiotic understanding
of meaning creation and perception (Bakhtin 1979).
Another definition of the public against this theoretical background claims
that the public sphere represents
open-ended flows of communication that enable socially distant interlocutors to
bridge social-network positions, formulate collective orientations, and generate psy-
chical “working alliances”, in pursuit of influence over issues of common concern.
Publics are not simply spaces or worlds where politics is discussed (…), but, rather,
interstitial networks of individuals and groups acting as citizens. States, economies,
and civil societies may all be relatively “bounded” and stable complexes of institu-
tions, but publicity is emergent (Emirbayer and Sheller 1998: 738).
From this emergent, overlapping, never-ending communicative space, the no-
tion of symbolic codes, i.e. a semiotic approach, developed. The public sphere is
a special space for the articulation of symbolic codes, values and represen-
tations that help to formulate individual and political orientations (Crossley and
Roberts 2004). Recently, terms such as “fluidity”, “networks” and “dynamic”
have entered this debate which relate, of course, to the development of new
media and the change in time-space distantiation (Preston 2001; Mattelart 2003;
see Couldry, Gruber, Jones, all this volume).
Recent research has also put forward the notion of a global public sphere in
which money, people and ideas travel ever faster and in ever increasing numbers.
Changes on a global level have altered the meaning of the public sphere, some
argue, in four ways: First, new forms of leisure and consumption patterns can be
detected, associated with global events and organisations like the World Cup or
MTV. Second, global economic public spheres have emerged that revolve
around organisations like the World Bank and IMF. Third, global political pub-
lics exist that act as “states”, examples being the EU, UN and UNESCO, and
 Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres 5

global political publics exist in the form of NGOs such as Amnesty Inter-
national, along with global social movements. Fourth, globalisation has recon-
stituted what is meant by the term “general public”. People increasingly know
about global events and global organisations and this knowledge helps them
construct a fluid cosmopolitan identity in small but significant ways (Sheller
and Urry 2003; see Koller and van Leeuwen, both this volume).
The four points sketched above can surely be agreed upon to some extent,
but certainly not in all of their implications. The definition of the globally inte-
grating public sphere still addresses a minority of globally interested citizens.
MTV, for example, is not a channel watched by the majority of a population but
only by a very small share (Chalaby 2002). However, a growing transnational
quality of media coverage and a growing transnational interest in global events
such as the Tsunami catastrophe point towards the further integration of public
spheres not only on a European, but also on a global level.
Within Europe, a de-centralising trend in the national public spheres has
gained momentum ever since the 1980s. Satellite TV, cable TV, and the Internet
further fragmented the media while at the same time reaching a growing trans-
national audience. While transnational television existed already in the 1950s,
the individual usage of the channels only became possible with the instalment of
satellites that boosted the possibility for TV channels to utilise an ever-growing
number of frequencies. National media regulations have been softened and are
now increasingly penetrated by transnational, or non-national television pro-
duction companies (Chalaby 2002; see Triandafyllidou, Wodak, and Krzyża-
nowski, forthcoming). This implies that communication has also become deci-
sively multi-directional. On a transnational level, two forms of broadcasting
spaces and configurations of culture have emerged: global broadcasting regions
link populations of neighbouring countries on the basis of proximity, common
cultural heritage and language, while on the other hand, diasporic transnational
broadcasting spaces are established which gather different national commu-
nities scattered across the globe into a single audience. In addition to the growth
in transnational communication, a focus on local communities, marginalised
populations and civic activists can be found just as well (Busch 2004). Fur-
thermore, media formats and genres have proliferated. Today, reading the
quality newspapers only provides a partial view of the political debate, supple-
mented by infotainment, edutainment and reality soaps. Political discourse is
not confined to the information genre anymore, but has left its mark on the en-
tertainment sector as well (see Holly, this volume).
During the production process of the media, the media producer imagines an
implicit reader (Iser 1972). In the context of the public sphere, this has an impor-
tant implication: On the one hand the reader can still be understood as a member
of civil society, as a citizen of the state, and the relationship to the audience as
imagined by the media producer remains paternal and aims at transmitting
6 Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak

values, habits and tastes. The transmission model of communication thus per-
sists, in which the ordered transfer of meaning is the intended consequence of the
communication process (Gardiner 2004; see also Bourdieu 2005 for a definition
of the journalistic field). On the other hand, however, readers/receivers that con-
stitute the audience are not citizens, but consumers. They consume media prod-
ucts and potentially also the products advertised for in the media. Unfortunately,
in this configuration of media communication, the scoop, i.e. the extraordinary
and the scandal, gains in importance since getting attention is regarded as being
more important than the transmission of content. Media production is an econ-
omic enterprise and even the public service media is dependent on quotas. Thus,
media production always walks the line between content orientation, factual rep-
resentations, and the necessity to reach and entertain as many people as possible.

3. Main dimensions throughout this volume

In terms of structure, the book is divided into four sections, drawing on and re-
lated to the developments in Social Theory briefly summarised above, with the
opening chapters laying the theoretical foundations for the study of communi-
cation in the public sphere (Part I). Subsequent contributions address the related
public spheres of business (Part II), politics (Part III) and the media (Part IV).
Cutting across these sections, the volume is organised around the three major
themes of public vs private, inclusion vs exclusion, and globalisation. Of course,
these themes also overlap and are separated here merely for analytical reasons.
The public sphere is impossible to think without demarcating it from the pri-
vate sphere. As Lazar elaborates in chapter 4, this binary opposition has tradi-
tionally been gendered, in that the private sphere was feminised while the public
sphere was co-constructed as masculine. However, the two are less of a dichot-
omy than the negative definition of “public” as “non-private” might suggest. In-
deed, the boundaries between the two are increasingly blurred, not least under
the impact of computer-mediated communication that, as Rodney Jones argues
in the final chapter of the book, blends virtual public spaces with the user’s pri-
vate space. And it is not only practices that lead to a hybrid public-private
sphere, but the ongoing informalisation, conversationalisation and “tabloidiza-
tion” (as Holly calls the trend, see chapter 14) of public discourses equally con-
tribute to an appropriation of the private by the public sphere.
Reversely, discourses originating in the private sphere cannot only influence
discourses in the public sphere, but become part of such public discourses as
well. A case in point is the grassroots activism that has impacted on corporate
policies and genres promoting corporate social and environmental responsi-
bility (see Skulstad, chapter 8). Now an established part of corporate commu-
nications, corporate environmental reports have been accused of being an
 Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres 7

example of “greenwashing”, i.e. incorporating activist demands into new genres

in order to manage a company’s public image. Similarly cynical attitudes can be
established for consumers’ reactions to other forms of corporate impression
management (Koller, chapter 7). As far as manipulation is an inherent element
of all public discourse to secure consumer loyalty, political majorities or media
reach, access to the public sphere is constrained by structures of inclusion and
exclusion.
Inclusion/exclusion in fact cuts across all other dimensions. As Wodak
points out in chapter 13, the public sphere consists of shifting groups, subject
positions and social identities. As these are constantly being negotiated, the pa-
rameters of inclusion and exclusion change along with them. Throughout the
following chapters, exclusion is discussed in its extreme form, as in Antho-
nissen’s study on censorship in South African newspapers (chapter 18), where
the political culture meant that silencing no longer required any legitimisation.
However, exclusion from public discourse is also shown to work more covertly,
relying on consensus-based hegemonic forms such as public debate formats
(Richardson, chapter 17).
On the other hand, groups traditionally excluded from public discourse
are striving to gain access to the public sphere through strategies referred to as
discourse design or discourse engineering. A case in point is the “professional-
isation” of the discourse of non-governmental organisations (see Mautner,
chapter 6), which have gained media attention for their agendas. Rodney Jones’
study of the impact of technology on access to (virtual) public spheres
(chapter 19) further shows how newly included groups and individuals bring
with them new genres and new subject positions. Here, emergent genres offer
new constraints and options for participants to articulate themselves. Finally, in
as far as features of communication in the private sphere impact on media dis-
course, e.g. in the case of tabloidisation (see Holly, chapter 14), we can see how
particular discourses shape the media and thereby make them more accessible.
Conversely, media also shape public discourses, making for new boundaries
that define who is included and who is excluded. One example is the “digital di-
vide” (see Gruber, chapter 16) that has broadened access for many while leaving
behind others.
As mentioned above, Parts II, III and IV in turn address the public spheres of
business, politics and the media. Despite the exclusion of many potential dis-
course participants in different localities, each of these three public spheres can
be seen as global in its outreach. In fact, Graham (chapter 2) speaks of a “glob-
ally mediated humanity” to capture this phenomenon. This quest for holding the
defining power in a potentially global discourse community is perhaps most ob-
viously the case for multi-national corporations, who metaphorically style
themselves as “global players” and seek to communicate a unified brand image
(see Koller, chapter 7).
8 Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak

The sphere of politics is increasingly characterised by the decline of the

nation state and the concomitant rise of supra-national and corporate organi-
sations. Parallel to that trend, however, we are witnessing a rise in sub-national
politics, as in the “Europe of regions”. Such “glocalisation” retains historically
grown constraints on discourse participants; for example, Richardson
(chapter 17) discusses the participation by proxy that we can see in public de-
bate formats as specific to British political culture. On a related note, Oberhuber
(chapter 12) shows how political concepts, such as “sustainability”, are dissemi-
nated and implemented differently in different political cultures.
Glocalisation is also seen at work in media communication, where a
homogenising force of global media conglomerates communicating the brand
values of their different publication channels is counterbalanced by media use
and media features indebted to local histories and cultures. Examples of the
latter are Jones’ study of Hong Kong teenagers’ use of internet chat forums
(chapter 19), Lazar’s discussion of the gendered public and private spheres in
Singapore (chapter 4) and Anthonissen’s account of exclusionary practices in
South African media discourse (chapter 18). Given the tension between global
and local forces shaping public discourses, it comes as no surprise that views on
participation in the global sphere range from the pessimistic (see Graham,
chapter 2) to the cautiously optimistic (see Mautner, chapter 6), with some con-
tributions holding a balanced middle ground in their assessment (see Holly,
chapter 14).

4. Structure of the volume

The nineteen chapters of this volume unfold as follows: The book opens with
Scott Wright’s overview of definitions of both the public sphere and the various
concepts and terms which inform the debate on it. This first chapter shows how
the very idea of the public sphere is contested, and particularly addresses how
language and communication can themselves be used to construct “the” public.
Wright links the political and sociological literature on the public sphere with
discourse analytical, sociolinguistic and communication approaches and thus
grounds the subsequent chapters. More specifically, he critically discusses the
seminal approach by Jürgen Habermas on “deliberative public spheres”, which
has influenced many recent approaches. As Habermas integrates a linguistic/
pragmatic approach to communication with Critical Theory, we believe this
debate to be salient for our volume.
Taking over from Wright, Phil Graham discusses how theorists of public
space have emphasised the centrality of language to the production and main-
tenance of political, cultural, economic and social commonalities. He juxta-
poses such notions of public space with ideas of private, proprietary or other-
 Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres 9

wise exclusive spaces and demonstrates how such spaces have usually been
construed as existing “inside” public space. Recent trends toward globalisation,
privatisation and commercialisation have led to a “privatised” global space
emerging from the political and economic integration of nationalised public
spaces. Importantly, Graham discusses how language itself becomes a central
object of contention as evidenced, for example, by the intellectual property and
trademark battles that continue over symbols of all kinds.
Laying the theoretical foundations for many of the chapters in Part IV (lan-
guage and communication in the media), Nick Couldry turns towards media dis-
course to confront the problem of “media effects”: While we know that media
are consequential for social life, the question of how they achieve to have such
an impact is a thorny one, given that specific effects of a particular media text
are unlikely to be traceable. By way of a tentative answer to what might be the
causal link between media discourse patterns and the patterning of social prac-
tice, the chapter reworks the notion of “category” as such a linking concept
within mediated cultures. Couldry suggests that media discourse naturalises cat-
egories of social description in at least two ways: first, through general media-
related categories (such as “liveness” or “reality”) that are involved in media
institutions’ constant attempt to legitimate themselves as “central” social insti-
tutions; second, through specific categories of social description whose constant
reinforcement through media is tied to the structural conditions of media pro-
duction.
Closing the first part of the book is Michelle Lazar, whose contribution
traces how the public sphere has been a central focus in debates on gender
(in)equality: Women’s access to, and participation in, the public sphere – the
traditional stronghold of men in most societies – have been among the key in-
dicators in measuring women’s emancipation. The fact remains, however, that
in many social, cultural and geographical contexts, communities of women have
yet to achieve equality in these terms, so that entry and presence in the public
sphere continue to be a struggle and an abiding goal. At the same time, Lazar
outlines the growing public discourse of post-feminism that claims that once in-
dicators of women’s participation in public life are met, as is the case for sectors
of women in modern industrialised societies, gender discrimination ceases to
exist. According to the author, what such claims overlook is that subtle forms of
sexism have emerged, which hinder (further) successes of women in public life;
indeed in spite of all gender mainstreaming policies (for example in the Euro-
pean Union or at the level of the UN). Lazar proposes the dismantling of the
deeply gendered public/private divide and a radical re-visioning of the gender
order. To this end, critical feminist analysis of discourse is a form of analytical
resistance that contributes to socially transformative goals.
The remaining three sections address, in turn, language and communication
in the public spheres of business, politics and the media. Beginning with busi-
10 Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak

ness, Guy Cook looks at public relations (PR) discourse, in which organi-
sations seek to present themselves and their activities to outsiders in a favour-
able light. The chapter shows how PR has become particularly salient and
powerful in the contemporary world of competitive corporate capitalism and
global communication, addressing PR and advertising, as its most spectacular
and ubiquitous form, from an applied linguistics perspective: Firstly, it estab-
lishes a theoretical basis for enquiry by defining PR and advertising, and show-
ing how they relate to each other. It examines their functions, and the degree to
which contemporary PR and advertising are (un)like other uses of language for
display and persuasion. Particular attention is paid to the construction of “the
public” in PR, and to the conflation of the public and private spheres in adver-
tising. Secondly, the chapter considers possible methods for the study of PR
and advertising, examining how linguistic and multimodal analyses can be in-
tegrated, what role automated corpus linguistic analysis can play, and how pub-
lic reactions to PR and advertising can be studied through surveys, interviews
and focus groups.
In another applied approach, Gerlinde Mautner outlines how organisational
communication is increasingly the subject of interventionist policies, with man-
agement regulating who communicates what to whom and how. Pursuing “inte-
grated” corporate and marketing communications, organisations attempt to ac-
quire a uniform and unique “voice” which reinforces their core brand values and
helps distinguish them from competitors. Internal homogenisation is meant to
enhance external differentiation. This chapter demonstrates that impacts of
these trends can be felt at both the macro-level of communications strategy as
well as the meso-level of genre and the micro-level of lexical choice. Design
initiatives are brought to bear on written and spoken communication, and on
verbal and visual modalities. The author places particular emphasis on the dis-
cursive fallout of communications design in the public and nonprofit sectors,
which have only fairly recently been exposed to market forces.
Corporations’ textually mediated projections of themselves into the public
sphere is also the subject of Koller’s chapter, which looks at the corporate lan-
guage used to this end and addresses the reaction of various publics to this com-
municated corporate identity (CI). It argues that CI represents a separate form of
collective identity and therefore promises valuable new insights into the pro-
duction, distribution and, most importantly, reception of self in discourse. In its
empirical part, the contribution is based on the qualitative research into a
sample mission statement. In terms of reception, systemic-functional analysis is
employed to investigate texts by customers (e.g. chatroom data providing word-
of-mouth testimonials). Results suggest that corporate impression management
is at odds with customers’ evaluation of the companies, thus pointing to a wi-
dening gap between narcissistic corporate self-promotion and grass-roots public
sentiment about corporations and their role in society.
 Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres 11

Still on the topic of corporate image creation, Skulstad discusses how the
growing awareness of environmental issues among individuals, companies and
governments has evoked a number of textual responses. One of these is corpor-
ate environmental reports, and the chapter looks at this genre at a relatively
early stage of emergence: reports issued by British companies between 1991
and 1993. The chapter shows that genre analysis is not a unified approach, and
that the analysis of new (emerging) genres represents specific problems. While
examining specific linguistic strategies used to achieve the communicative aim
of creating a positive corporate image in the public sphere, the chapter also
shows that the use of visuals plays an important role in achieving specific com-
municative functions. Links are drawn to other genres in the public sphere, par-
ticularly corporate annual reports and corporate documents on animal testing is-
sues.
Bridging the public spheres of business and politics, de Michelis’ contribu-
tion aims to reveal the ideological dimension underpinning the language used
by New Labour in its discourse on British national identity. De Michelis dem-
onstrates how New Labour’s agenda in projecting a more flexible, accommodat-
ing sense of “Britishness” is consistently expressed using forms of specialised
communication. In particular, its discourse of nationhood focuses on the key
metaphor of “the nation as corporation”, given currency by an enthusiastic use
of marketing techniques in politics. Empirically, the chapter draws on a variety
of different communicative forms including think-tank reports, official surveys
and British Council publications. The analysis shows that New Labour’s rheto-
ric of “nationhood” and “change” is in reality a vehicle for a fundamentally
ideological attempt to alter the very process of political culture by adapting it to
managerial and corporate discourses. As a consequence, such alignment leads to
a ritualisation of politics and political discourse along quasi-corporate lines,
which translates into a loss of power on the part of political actors.
De Michelis’ chapter shows how persuasion and discursive re-alignment op-
erates at both a micro- and a macro-level. Historically, persuasive rhetoric gave
rise to politics and was adopted wholeheartedly by companies in their public re-
lations efforts (see Cook, chapter 5). The wheel has come full circle by political
actors adapting marketing tactics, such as advertising (see Reisigl, chapter 11)
and blogging to communicate with carefully targeted markets, formerly known as
constituencies. Part II comprises contributions on what historically constituted,
and is often still equated with, the public sphere: politics. The section starts out
with Paul Chilton’s treatment of political terminology. Seeing political behaviour
as largely dependent on the human language faculty, and given that political
structures and processes vary across space and time, linguistic practices are as-
sumed to vary accordingly. Considering political terminology found in English,
in the context of British and American polities, the chapter investigates the shared
vocabulary that is required by political actors to conventionally refer to shared
12 Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak

structures and processes. The contribution discusses the semantics of a number of

key political terms, including the conceptualisations that cluster around them:
Since politics involves difference and disagreement as well as coordination and
cooperation, there will be semantic and conceptual variation within political
communities. The chapter closes by raising the question if, despite variations in
polity, there could be some universals in the vocabulary of politics.
In the subsequent chapter, Reisigl extends the treatment of language and
communication in politics from the lexical level to that of genre. In his contribu-
tion, political speeches are seen as having potentially strong perlocutionary ef-
fects and sometimes even constituting important driving forces in political his-
tory. Seen as such, political speeches are socially integrative by contributing to
the formation of group solidarity. On the other hand, they can fulfil disintegrative
and destructive functions by mobilising addressees to social exclusion and, at
worst, to martial attacks against those excluded by the orator. The chapter gives
an overview of attempts to typify political speeches on the basis of thematic,
functional, rhetorical and other criteria. Sub-genres such as presidential speeches,
parliamentary speeches and commemorative speeches are included in this typo-
logical discussion. Reisigl’s contribution further shows that orally performed
political speeches, rather than being monologic, in fact realise conventionalised
activity patterns that involve different groups of participants. The chapter closes
by outlining the main constitutive conditions of political oratory, reconstructing
its genesis and delineating the distribution of modern political speeches in the
age of computer-assisted text production and multimodal mass media. With
respect to the mass-mediated distribution of political speeches, the role of public
relations and the influence of media coverage and reception will be examined.
The chapter thus links back to Cook’s contribution on PR, as well as anticipating
Part IV on media as a public sphere.
Further extending the notion of language and communication in politics,
Oberhuber’s entry on the dissemination and implementation of political concept
draws on case studies and theoretical approaches from a variety of disciplines.
In particular, this chapter reviews the literature from Anglo-American, German
and French academic traditions, discussing contributions from lexicology and
language history, as well as presenting selected studies on dissemination of
political concepts. With respect to implementation, the focus is on several ap-
proaches of theorising the mediation between the social and the linguistic, in-
cluding critical discourse analysis, cognitive metaphor theory and Foucault’s
work on “discursive formations” and “governmentality”. This part of the chapter
also reviews selected contributions from neighbouring disciplines like history
and political theory. The chapter closes by presenting recent exemplary case
studies with a view to identifying basic processes and research issues within dis-
semination and implementation of political concepts, such as social power and
discursive hegemony.
 Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres 13

Focusing on exclusion through discrimination, prejudice and stereotype in

political discourse, Wodak discusses some of the many rhetorical devices used
by politicians in their attempts to persuade the electorate of a specific agenda.
The author argues that one of the most important and indeed, constitutive dis-
cursive macro-strategies, positive self-presentation and negative other-presen-
tation, is crucial for the discursive construction of in- and out-groups. This divi-
sion into US and THEM furthermore serves as precondition for derogating,
debasing and discriminating against “Others” in all possible genres in public
and private spheres. Drawing on examples from recent political discourses in
European countries, the chapter demonstrates that Critical Linguistics and Criti-
cal Discourse Analysis (CDA) as well as research on multimodality allow in-
vestigating the subtle means of conveying discrimination through typical and
also newly created stereotypes, often realised through insinuations and preju-
diced discursive practices. This chapter draws on examples from recent political
discourses in European countries to illustrate the manifold ways of excluding
“Others”, specifically in the now Europe-wide rightwing populist rhetoric.
Werner Holly’s contribution on the tabloidisation of political communi-
cation in the public sphere charts the common ground between politics and
media. The author here makes a case that the public sphere has undergone fun-
damental structural changes, often referred to as a “colonisation” of the political
by the media system, or as a “mediocracy” that has replaced even democrati-
cally legitimated power. Like the major mass media, which are increasingly pur-
suing commercial aims, politics has thus become subject to a process of tabloi-
disation, re-orienting itself towards mainstream tastes and their need for
entertainment. However, as the chapter argues, “symbolic politics” does so for
persuasive rather than commercial reasons, using strategies such as visual-
isation, staging, dramatisation and aestheticisation of political communication.
Re-orientation towards aspects of entertainment and clarity does not necessarily
translate into inferior quality and more trivial, banal politics. As long as politi-
cal communication still adheres to the basic categories of information value,
truth, relevance and comprehensibility, we may be witnessing a popularisation,
even democratisation, rather than tabloidisation of political communication.
The final section of the book, language and communication in the media,
opens with van Leeuwen’s chapter on the role of genre in global media com-
munication. Introducing first a specific approach to the analysis of media
genres, it argues that, under globalisation, media genres are becoming increas-
ingly homogeneous, while media content can remain local. Genre is therefore
becoming the key ensuring cohesion in a discursively diverse world, not only in
the media. A number of media genres is considered, including newspaper pages
and magazine celebrity profiles.
Helmut Gruber complements the preceding chapter by looking specifically
at genre features of new mass media, such as e-mail and newsgroup communi-
14 Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak

cation, internet relay chat, hypertext, and short text messages. He defines genres
as specific combinations of communicative factors like the direction of com-
munication (monologue vs. dialogue), communication channels (visual vs. ver-
bal, synchronous vs. asynchronous) and modes of communication (spoken vs.
written). The chapter starts by characterising the different genres on these di-
mensions, discussing commonalities and differences. Following that, the con-
tribution discusses linguistic and communicative characteristics of each of the
genres, giving special attention to interpersonal and textual characteristics.
Gruber closes by addressing the impact of different access to, and use of com-
munication in, the new media (“digital divide”), which again links to the overall
theme of “inclusion/exclusion”. Gruber argues that although the new media
initiated a “democratisation” of communication among those who have access
to them, the gap between new media users and non-users has severe social con-
sequences.
In a different angle on mass media, Kay Richardson focuses on specific de-
bate formats, principally in the broadcast media (radio and television) with
some comparative reference to print media (the newspaper letters page) and
electronic media (online chat). The chapter begins with a short discussion of
how the varying broadcast “debate” formats; including one-to-one interviews,
audience discussion programmes and phone-ins fulfil different functions in the
broadcasting schedule, concentrating on different areas of social life from high
politics to lifestyle issues, and being designed for different audiences. In the
central section of the paper she analyses extracts from two programmes chosen
for maximum contrast, namely material from Any Questions, the long-running
British radio audience participation programme, and extracts from the kind of
“lifestyle” programming represented by Jerry Springer’s American talk show.
In both cases attention is given to the different type of public which these pro-
grammes seek to establish and the discursive means they use to do this.
In her chapter on silencing and censorship, Christine Anthonissen extends
the scope from uses to abuses of the mass media. She considers two kinds of
censorship that are prevalent in media discourses, namely censorship of the
powerful, who may violate the rights of lesser subjects, and censorship of
weaker subjects, whose rights have been violated or are under threat of being vi-
olated. Her chapter investigates state censorship which relies on the legislative
and retributive powers of government and which is introduced on various
grounds such as concern for public morality, state security etc. Such state cen-
sorship may retrospectively remove already published texts, or may disallow fu-
ture publication of potentially harmful matter. The contribution also investi-
gates self-censorship of subjects who prefer to keep information from public
scrutiny in the media on various grounds such as fear of self-incrimination, fear
of state prosecution or fear of public humiliation. By way of illustration, the
chapter draws on material from recent South African media.
 Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres 15

The last chapter in this section, and in the book, revisits a question that is
fundamental to this book, namely participation in emergent public spheres with
their shifting boundaries. To this end, Rodney Jones outlines how computer me-
diated communication (CMC) has shifted flows of discourse and power in the
“public sphere”, opening up spaces for new discursive practices and identities
and giving people access to a myriad of “imagined communities”. He argues
that an understanding of how CMC has changed participation on the social, cul-
tural and political levels also means considering how it has changed patterns
and possibilities of participation on the more basic level of situated social ac-
tions in everyday life. This is why Jones explores the way young people in Hong
Kong use computers to strategically manage their social worlds and their rela-
tionships. Computers, for these young people and for many others, are not so
much tools for communication as they are tools for managing and navigating so-
cial networks and resisting and redrawing social boundaries imposed by par-
ents, teachers and other authorities. In closing, the author argues that under-
standing the mechanics of power and resistance in situated, everyday actions
with technology is the first step to understanding technology’s potential to affect
power relations and ideologies in larger social, institutional and cultural con-
texts.
Apart from bringing together contributors from four continents, the volume
also shows a wide interdisciplinarity range, combining various areas of lin-
guistics such as critical discourse analysis (Reisigl, Wodak), genre analysis
(Skulstad), multimodal analysis (van Leeuwen), pragmatics (Cook) and cogni-
tive semantics (Chilton, Koller). These fields within linguistics act in concert
with management studies (Mautner, Skulstad), political science (Oberhuber,
Wright) and media studies (Couldry, Richardson). What these different ap-
proaches have in common is that they link social theories and social change (see
section 1) back to concrete textual instances of a whole range of genres. As such,
each contribution can be located in the framework of Applied Linguistics.
Broadly conceived, the discipline seeks to harness the linguistic analysis of nat-
urally occurring data in the solution of real-life, often social, problems. To the
extent that communication in the public sphere is characterised by power asym-
metries, marginalisation and exclusion along different dimensions, interdisci-
plinary applied linguistic research can help to uncover the mechanisms that dis-
advantage particular groups and thus – at least – raise awareness; or even, in
a really applied way, propose new and different communicative patterns. The
problem-based research underlying the contributions means that the instruments
for linking macro-level theories back to their micro-level textual instantiations,
such as rhetorical or semantic analysis, are handed flexibly yet consistently.
On the whole, then, we hope that this volume will contribute to an inter-
disciplinary treatment of how language and communication work to shift the
boundaries of ever-emergent public spheres.
16 Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak

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I. Theoretical foundations
1. Language, communication and the public
sphere: Definitions
Scott Wright

The art of talking, the thing that makes

human beings what they are, has become
a refuge for recusants. Our public dis-
course has become unworthy of the name
and will remain so unless and until we
decide to change it. Maybe it is time we
talked about it. (Kettle 2005)

1. Introduction

Language and communication are two of the building blocks of any conceptual-
isation of a public sphere. If people do not communicate, or could not communi-
cate because they were linguistically incomprehensible, a public sphere cannot
be said to exist. The notion that people can and do communicate is essential,
though often left as a given and not made explicit. Moreover, it is not just the
fact that people communicate that is important, but which people are communi-
cating, exactly how they do this, and to what effect. Put simply, who is this pub-
lic, and how do they conduct themselves?
This chapter will firstly briefly define language. Secondly, two broad
schools of thought about communication – the process school and the semiotic
school – are outlined. I will argue that the two are not incompatible before pro-
viding an initial, layered, definition of communication. My analysis will begin
with Jürgen Habermas’s conceptualisation of the public sphere. I will then out-
line the various criticisms and alternative conceptualisations of this model. This
will be developed into an account of why many assume that the contemporary
public sphere is in crisis before outlining the debate between those who argue
that the internet is a potential solution to these problems and those who argue
that it will be its death knell. The chapter will conclude that there is no such
thing as “the” public sphere. Rather, there are public spheres. Any definition must
take account of this distinction, and this, combined with the growing number of
alternative approaches to public sphere theorising, necessitates a multi-defini-
tional, transdisciplinary approach.
22 Scott Wright

2. Language and the public sphere

Language, at its most basic, is a set of symbols and sounds governed by rules of
grammar for conveying information. Formal linguistics, for its part, studies the
properties of natural language (as opposed to artificial, created languages).
Early linguistics (that is, prior to Chomsky) tended to collect a corpus of data
(text), which was then collated and categorised into its “constituent” parts
(Searle 1972). This was achieved by using research methodologies derived from
theories of language construction. In essence, linguistics provided the tools to
deconstruct the text. In the behaviouralist vein, linguistics did not, however,
concern itself with the meaning of sentences.
Noam Chomsky was prominent in revising such attitudes. Chomsky (1957,
1965) showed through an analysis of syntax that structural linguistic methods
were not sufficient for analysing sentences; they struggled to cope with
the notion that, in principle, the number of sentences was infinite. Moreover,
Chomsky showed that structural linguistics struggled to determine (and, indeed,
categorise) the internal relationships of certain “ambiguous” sentences.1 The
categorising approach employed in the analysis of phonemes and morphemes,
although fine for analysing words, was often redundant when analysing whole
sentences.
Chomsky’s response was to adopt a Universalist approach to grammar “that
accommodates the creative aspect of language use and expresses the deep-
seated regularities which, being universal, are omitted from the grammar itself”
(Chomsky 1965: 6). The Universalist approach, which places Chomsky in the
rationalist philosophical tradition, argues that language is a toolset of specific
universal principles, intrinsic in the human mind, derived from human beings’
genetic structure.2 This was developed into his theory of generative grammar,
which provided a series of grammatical rules that could be used to account for
the infinite number of possible sentences. This was subsequently developed as
Chomsky (1965) attempted to explain all linguistic relations between sound and
meaning system. Grammar, for Chomsky, had three parts. The syntactical el-
ement as previously outlined, plus two interpretative elements: a phonological
component and a semantic component that describe the sound and meaning pro-
duced by the syntax.
Chomsky’s theory has generated considerable debate. Of particular impor-
tance here are the generative semanticists who argue that Chomsky did not go far
enough; for insisting that syntax should be studied independent from meaning
when meaning is thought to shape syntax. Put more strongly, generative gram-
mar is inadequate because it separates the study of language form from the study
of its communicative function (Stringer 1973). As John Searle (1972) argues,
Chomsky’s approach is eccentric because viewing language as a formal system
sidelines languages’ importance for communicating meaning. Such arguments
 Language, communication and the public sphere: definitions 23

have been deeply influential in the debates about language and communication,
and will be returned to later when I discuss the semiotic school. It would be use-
ful now though to express some of the more general claims that have derived (at
least implicitly) from this.
Neil Thompson (2003: 37), following Martin Montgomery (1995), argues
that “language is not simply the ability to use words”; it “refers to the complex
array of interlocking relationships which form the basis of communication and
social interaction.” They use this position to argue that language is central to so-
ciety – and we know that societal identification is central to the public sphere.
Montgomery (1995: 251) argues that: “Language informs the way we think, the
way we experience, and the way we interact with each other.” He goes further,
to argue that language is “the basis of community (…) Systematic knowledge
about language and practical awareness of how it works is fundamental to the
process of building mature communities.” Similarly, Thompson (2003: 36)
states that language is “a primary factor in terms of the make-up of society in
relation to both cultural and structural factors.” We can see this most obviously
in phatic communication, which can help to maintain the cohesiveness of a pub-
lic sphere by reinforcing bonds through confirming that the communication is
being received and understand (Jakobson 1960).3
These arguments suggest that language is central to the construction of the
public sphere because it helps to determine who is “in” and who is “out”. It also
raises important questions about communication between different languages in
the public sphere. This is most obviously problematic in transnational, multilin-
gual forums. (Wodak and Wright 2007) The (admittedly controversial) Sapir-
Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis, for example, proposes that language
determines (and not just influences) a person’s thought. Thus, according to the
hypothesis, people with different languages actually perceive the world differ-
ently rather than perceiving it the same but expressing their perceptions in dif-
ferent languages.
Less controversially, a distinction has been made between predominantly
collectivistic cultures (for example, Japan) and individualistic cultures (Europe/
North America), and how this can affect the nature of communication. Edward
Hall (1976) argues that collectivist cultures tend to use high context communi-
cation, in which the context (relative status, for example) and visual signs are
important in determining meaning. Individualistic cultures, on the other hand,
tend to use context to a lesser degree, thus requiring more explicit use of lan-
guage.4
One can clearly see the potential confusion that could occur when communi-
cating inter-culturally. This has been highlighted in business communications
by an HSBC bank advert expounding on how important their “local knowledge”
is in ensuring effective communication/trading in the global economy (see also
Koller 2007). Although these arguments are moving more into the field of com-
24 Scott Wright

munication as opposed to language, the two are obviously linked, with various
factors such as culture helping to shape the relationship. It is, thus, necessary to
move towards a definition of communication.

3. Defining communication

Numerous chapters, articles and books are devoted to defining communication.

As John Fiske (1990: 1) notes, communication “is one of those human activities
that everyone recognizes but few can define satisfactorily.” Fiske (1990: 2) de-
scribes communication simply: “social interaction through messages”. Arthur
Asa Berger (2000: 271), adopting a media-based approach, defines communi-
cation as “a process that involved the transmission of messages from senders to
receivers.” John Corner and Jeremy Hawthorne (1993: 2), meanwhile, state that
“communication studies is about how human meanings are made through the
production and reception of various types of sign. It is about visual and verbal
sign systems and the technologies used to articulate, record and convey them.”
The problem with any definition of communication is that, in trying to be broad
enough to cover the subjects’ diversity, the explanatory power of the definition
can be lost. For example, we might say that communication is, in essence, about
how human beings interconnect with each other. But what does this actually tell
us? In an attempt to fully account for the complexities of communication, many
studies have used diagrams to visualise communication. Broadly speaking,
there are two schools of thought. I will take each in turn.

3.1. The process school

The Process School involves the transmission of messages (it is also known
widely as the transmission model or sender-receiver model, as indicated by
Berger’s definition above) from a sender to the receiver (Fiske 1990). One of the
founding contributions to the process school was published by Claude Shannon
and Warren Weaver (1949). Although it has similarities to Harold Lasswell’s
preceding formula5 (1948), the attempt to visually model communication was
distinctive (and helped to create a tradition of using diagrams as explanatory
tools). In the Process School, the sender initiates the communication by en-
coding some piece of information in the form of a message. A message is typi-
cally denoted by the intention to communicate, and thus often excludes “unin-
tended” messages. Messages are transmitted through some method (such as
face-to-face or by the media) to one or more persons. The message is then suc-
cessfully decoded, dependent on distortions (noise) within the communicative
process, by the receiver. Thus, this model emphasises the transporting of “the
message” from A to B – and is particularly useful for mediated forms of com-
 Language, communication and the public sphere: definitions 25

munication; the sender/medium being particularly important as they shape the

extent to which the receiver successfully decodes the message. It is in this stage
of the model that language is important. However, particularly in earlier models,
language is given an almost formulaic, neutral quality. If this school is correct,
we can imagine that communication in the public sphere would be a relatively
simple process.

Figure 1. Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) Transmission Model

Shannon and Weaver’s basic “straight-line” model has been extensively devel-
oped to take account of the obstacles that, in real life situations, may block the
“direct” path of “the message”. There are a number of (often related) impedi-
ments. These can include the relative status of the sender and receiver (be it a
gender, educational or class difference); the cognitive state of the receiver (who
may not decode the message as intended and therefore receive a different mes-
sage (Sless 1981; Streeck 1994); the fact that communication often involves a
reply, and this may alter the message and suggests a loop rather than straight line
(Dance 1967),6 and technical impediments such as loss of communicative sig-
nal. Such impediments may make it more realistic to describe the process as the
transmission of “the intended message”. Two process models stand out for their
attempts to account for communicative complexity.
George Gerbner (1956) was particularly interested in perceptions and con-
text. Gerbner believed that events and messages were perceived differently by
the communicator and receiver, and that this was influenced by the context – in a
dynamic relationship. The model also includes factors such as the availability,
access and control of (and to) the means of communication, which is particu-
larly important for mediated environments.7 In Gerbner’s model we begin to see
a cross-over between the Process School and the Semiotic School.
Gerbner’s model begins with an external event (E), which is received
(clearly or unclearly) and interpreted by a human or machine (M) and under-
stood to a greater or lesser extent (E1). It is in the complex relationship between
the event and the receiver that meaning is developed. And this is itself in-
fluenced by education, culture and various other socio-political factors. The sec-
ond stage of Gerbner’s model relates to the medium (form) by which the mes-
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