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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 14:2 (2015) ► pp.205–232

Aligning language to ideology

A socio-semantic analysis of communist and democratic mass media language in Bulgaria

| University of Michigan |
This paper compares and analyzes mass media language in Bulgaria before and after the breakdown of the communist regime with the goal to reveal the effect of political setting, communist vs. democratic, on the form of public discourse in the media. The comparison reveals statistically significant differences in the types of grammatical constructions used in the communist and democratic media (active vs. passive), as well as differences in grammatical properties of nouns (animacy, concreteness, and properness) and verbs (tense and evidentiality). I propose that the observed differences are best explained within a sociocognitive model of context proposed by van Dijk (2008). From this perspective, linguistic characteristics of the democratic and communist discourse examined in the paper reflect speakers’ shared beliefs about the system of social meanings and fundamental principles of their respective societies, such as humanism vs. institutionalism, individualism vs. collectivism, and the differences in the perception of time.
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, mass media language, socio-semantics, Bulgarian media
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Comparative Analysis: Methodology
  • 3.Case Study 1: Agentivity and the Mapping of Semantic Roles
    • 3.2Methodology
    • 3.2Results
    • 3.2Discussion
  • 4.Case Study 2: Lexical Properties of Subject Nouns and Nouns’ Individuation
    • 4.2Methodology
    • 4.2Results
    • 4.2Discussion
      • 4.2.1Animacy
      • 4.2.2Proper names
      • 4.2.3Concreteness
    • 4.2Individuation: The collective effect of animacy, concreteness, and properness
  • 5.Case Study 3: Grammatical Properties of Verbs: Tense and Evidentiality
    • 5.2Tense
      • 5.2.1Methodology
      • 5.2.2Results
      • 5.2.3Discussion: Tense
    • 5.2Evidentiality
      • 5.2.1Methodology
      • 5.2.2Results
      • 5.2.3Discussion: Evidentiality
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 August 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.2.02smi
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