Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics) by browse.metadata.advisor "Bernard, Taryn"

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    A critical analysis of media discourse after a natural flooding disaster in Malawi, in 2015
    (2018-03) Chikaipa, Victor; Anthonissen, Christine; Bernard, Taryn; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This is a multimodal critical discourse analysis study that investigates the media discursive strategies in the representation of the catastrophic flooding disaster of January 2015 in Malawi. It analyses the representation of social actors in local print and international online websites, investigating which discursive strategies are typically used to present the selected content, and what the overt and covert meanings are that visual and linguistic texts puts out to their respective implied audiences. The theoretical and analytical framework uses a combination of different approaches within CDA, specifically Fairclough’s (1992, 1995) dialectal relational approach, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2006) Grammar of Visual Design, and Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Model. Using a multimodal approach, the study analyses articles purposively selected from a data corpus of 308 news articles that incorporated 313 news images gathered from two local Malawian print media, namely The Daily Times and The Nation, and two international online news websites, The Guardian and Daily Mail Online. The methodology is predominantly qualitative although some elements of quantitative paradigm were used to explain patterns, frequency and or volume of media coverage. The data is organised according to emerging themes, and the analysis is done by critical reading of the verbal and visual texts. The findings are that both the local and international media use discursive strategies that negatively represented the floods as destructive without due attention to the possible contribution of unsustainable agricultural activities of humans that are likely to have triggered or exacerbated the disaster and its effects. In addition, overlapping and interlocking discourses, namely humanitarian, hegemonic and expertise discourses, are evident of the dependencies in the global north – south divide. Further, there is a generic positive portrayal of the donor countries and non-profit organisations as effective and with agency, and at the same time a negative representation of the Malawian government and victims of the crisis as passive recipients of the relief aid. Although the multimodal analysis shows how the reporting upholds and perpetuates stereotypes of gender in the media representation of the disasters, this analysis established that there is minimal difference between ways in which men and women are portrayed by the local (insider) as compared to the international (outsider) media. This is significant considering another stereotype according to which the people of the UK are seen to be relatively liberal and sensitive to gender role casting as opposed to the African media that are seen be relatively conservative in subscribing to traditional gender role casting. Overall, the findings reveal that the media representation of the floods is not neutral; rather it is socially constructed with various ideological perspectives. The study contributes greatly to an understanding of the general linguistic and visual discursive tendencies that local print and international media use in the portrayal of participants in a flooding disaster that occurred in a relatively remote country such as Malawi. In addition, it fills a gap that exists in semiotics on the empirical studies that focus on the interplay between verbal texts and images in disaster representations in African contexts specifically, and in the global south more broadly.