Learner Resource 16.1 ‒ The language of news: Collocations

We would be labouring under a mistaken assumption if we believe newspapers in Britain are or should be impartial and neutral. This has never been the case. When newspapers first started they set out to express ‘freedom of speech’: express opinion and challenge authority. This ‘freedom of the press’ has been continued and defended as a democratic right ever since. Newspapers have never pretended to be impartial. The Sun, indeed, is a campaigning paper and often advertises itself as such by getting its readers to display posters in their cars or houses expressing their solidarity with its views about an issue.

Nevertheless, many people get a great deal of their information about the world from a newspaper. In fact they might never experience first-hand the events or meet the people referred to in the articles (Muslims, for example, or refugees or transgender people) but they may rely on the paper as an information source about them. What most of us forget is that the information newspapers present to us is highly selective. A particular viewpoint about an event has been encoded in the language chosen by the editors/writers and it is often ideologically loaded. As the reader was not there at the original event, it is nearly impossible for us to imagine another way of interpreting this event and so we are likely to end up sharing the point of view presented to us. If we had no knowledge at all of a particular thing (people of the Muslim religion) and only know about something from what the papers say to us about it, it is even more likely that we will end up believing their version of events or sharing their ideological position.

Try this:

Put the following words into your Google search box:

·  illegal

·  migrant

·  youth

·  young

·  school

o  What words automatically appear next without you typing them in?

o  Why does this happen?

o  What does this tell you about the automatic assumptions in most people’s minds when they hear these words?

Word choice, as we’ve already established, can convey numerous ‘messages’ about the producer, production company and intended reader/reading. This does, of course, presume that there is a high level of freedom of choice in lexical selection and combination. However, often words seem simply to ‘go together’.

Version 1 1 © OCR 2017

Linguistic variations of power

For example, ‘strong’ and ‘powerful’ are near-synonyms. However, we’d be much more likely to ask for a ‘strong coffee’ than a ‘powerful’ one. This is called collocation – literally: co-locating words.

In media headlines, collocation is used so much so that the combinations become clichés. Try to predict the combinations by completing the following headlines:

1 ARTICLE ABOUT AN INDUSTRIAL DISPUTE

Choose which word naturally fits this headline: Jogging, Walking, Running

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2164473/...... -battles-break-police-union-picket-line-British-fuel-refinery-threatened-massive-job-cuts.html#ixzz4XKYhQsPc

2 ARTICLE ABOUT YOUNG PEOPLE

Choose which words naturally fit in this headline:

Blank 1: lots, groups, gangs,

Blank 2: annoy, terrorise, upset


Read more: http://www.oldham-chronicle.co.uk/news-features/8/news-headlines/93601/______-of-youths-______-community

If we always hear these words together, what might be the effect on how the readers think about these events or groups of people?

Version 1 2 © OCR 2017

Linguistic variations of power