The Life of Hong Kong in Media - Literature review Example

DIS ANALYSIS OF NEWSPAPER ARTICLES by The of the The of the School The and State where it is located The Date Discourse Analysis of Newspaper Articles It is not a secret that every society is characterized by social exclusion of particular groups of people. Hong Kong is not an exception as there is a range of marginalized groups in the region. Among these groups are refugees and asylum seekers, whose social and economic status deprives them of the privileges of legitimate citizens. Due to the precarity refugees face today in Hong Kong (as the majority of them spend years waiting for their cases to be heard and have no legal status), the local newspapers are studded with articles on the current state of the group (Unhcr.org, 2014). Among such articles are those ones posted in South China Morning Post. Overall, the two articles assess the social standing of the refugees and torture claimants, discuss the challenges faced by the marginalized group in the light of the recent court hearings. Therefore, the community accessed in the articles under consideration is the immigrants, who are positioned as “Others”. At the same time, the readership, or the intended audience is positioned as “We” and is supposed to be comprised of typical readers of South China Morning Post, who definitely are the citizens of Hong Kong. From the title of the first article, which is “Four Refugees, Torture Claimant Seek Ruling on Right to Work in Hong Kong”, it follows that the subject matter deals with the problems refugees face in the region. As the information definitely comes from the citizen of Hong Kong, the party in interest that cares a lot about the situation at the labour market and, consequently, does not want to concede jobs to immigrants, it is possible to make an assumption that the author will try to convince the reader to think the same way. In this regard, maxims of conversation within the framework of traditional discourse analysis and their violation in particular should be mentioned. Despite the fact that that the term contains the word “conversation”, maxims of conversation can be also applied to written texts for many kinds of them (letters, newspaper articles, advertisements) work as one sided conversations. In the article under consideration, the author intentionally fails to observe maxims with the aim to make the reader look for the additional meaning in the text. More specifically, the reporter violates the maxim of manner. The latter presupposes giving information in the briefest and clearest way avoiding ambiguity (Grice, 1975; Hadi, 2013). Violation of this maxim takes several forms in the text under consideration. First of all, it is the order of presentation of information. In the beginning of the article, the author gives the information on the reason the refugees start their fight; in the middle of the text, the need to find a job is mentioned; and only in the end the legal background for such efforts is given. In case the maxim was not violated, the author would mention that the group of refugees has the legal right to work but the government hinders them from having a job. Secondly, it is the choice of words that speaks for the maxim violation. In particular, negative attributions, such as “jobless”, and labels, for example, “claimants”, “refugees” etc., throughout the article (Chiu, 2012). By violating the maxim of manner, the author establishes authority and social power of the government over the refugees. As it has been mentioned above, the fact that the information about the group of refugees, who “demand” the right to work, is placed in the very beginning means that it is the most important information in the opinion of the author. In addition to this, the generally accepted idea that newspaper reports have the inverted pyramid structure also suggests the same. As not enough attention is paid to the legal rights of the refugees, it is obvious that the author tends to discriminate the group supposing they aim to steal jobs from the citizens. Another means used to discriminate the refugees is to present them as the “Others” and oppose them to “Us”, the dominating group. In accordance with van Dijk (2004), there are three main concepts used to characterize the “Others”: difference, deviance and transgression, and threat. In this particular text, the “Others” are characterized with the use of the first principle. More specifically, they are represented as those who have different social background compared to that one the majority has. Their difference is best represented through the use of negative attributions encountered in the text, such as “jobless”, “depressed”; labels “claimants”, “refugees”, passive voice in regard to the marginalized group (“be allowed”, “is recognized”, “are trapped”, “are stranded”) and active voice to define the power group actions (Chiu, 2012). In addition to this, the author de-emphasizes the negative actions of the government mentioning it protects the labour market and at the same time threatens the audience that the marginalized group can fill the available vacancies. Overall, all these strategies work together to create a negative representation of the refugees and instill the idea of power and dominance of the government and the legal system, the institutions, which play an important role in decision making (Dijk, 1994). The second article titled “Treatment of Torture Claimants in Breach of Laws and Treaties” is taken from the same newspaper, which is South China Morning Post. Despite the fact that the two articles under consideration are written by different authors, the attitude towards the marginalized groups appears to be the same. With the aim to prove it, the violation of maxims of conversation in the second article will be analyzed as well. Interestingly, the same maxim of conversation, which is the maxim of manner, is violated in the second text. In this case, just like in any other text studied within the framework of discourse analysis, context is very important here due to the fact that this approach is transdisplinary in nature (Dijk and Kintsch, 1983; Dijk, 2004; Fairclough, n. d.). As it has been established before, the audience is comprised of average citizens of Hong Kong, with the latter having some problems with high density of population and small territory, which means that immigrants are not really welcomed there. As well as the previous article, this one has a top-down structure meaning that the most important information is mentioned in the very beginning. In the author’s opinion, the idea that the landmark decision of the top court could result in “hundreds, possibly thousands, of claims” is the key piece of news (Chiu, 2013). Further as the text goes, the author explains that the ruling is believed not to lead to the increase in the number of those who want to move to Hong Kong in search of a better living conditions. In the last paragraph, the author mentions that the case, which has been regarded as the one that can give hope to a great number of immigrants, is solved not in favour of the plaintiff. This means that the threat of the “influx” of immigrants is a fake. However, with the aim to threaten the readership, the author of the article under consideration has decided to put this obviously essential information at the very end of the piece. In other words, the reporter has decided to foreground the threat of the inrush of refugees rather than the fact that there is no actual background for it. As it has been mentioned above, taking into account the social context, such an arrangement of data in the text is targeted at threatening the intended audience. Thus, the concept of threat is used to characterize the group, and this means its representatives are regarded as the “Others”. From this, it follows that in the article refugees are presented as the marginalized group and are discriminated. Like in the first article, the choice of words explained by the intentional violation of the maxim of manner positions discussed group as the marginalized one. Here in the text, the same range of attributes and labels is used. In addition to this, violating the maxim of manner, the author presents information in a vague, generalized, ambiguous way by means of exaggeration of figures (“hundreds, possible thousands, of claims”) with the aim to instill fear in the dominating group (Tsuda, 1993; Chiu, 2013). This results in further discrimination and alienation of the marginalized group from the majority in the society. The two texts have been chosen for the analysis to show how the marginalized groups are presented in the printed media in Hong Kong and how language is used with the aim to impose the view of the majority and discriminate against the particular groups excluded from the society in accordance with specific features. As the framework for traditional discourse analysis there have been chosen Paul Grices theory of implicatures and the maxims of conversation in particular. In the course of critical discourse analysis, there has been established that language choice made about refugees in Hong Kong place the group in the margins of the society. In other words, the results of the critical discourse analysis show that refugees are the objects of discrimination while the government and the legal system occupy prestigious positions in the hierarchy of the society. References Chiu, A. 2012. Four refugees, torture claimant seek ruling on right to work in Hong Kong. South China Morning Post. Chiu, J. 2013. Treatment of torture claimants in breach of laws and treaties. South China Morning Post. Dijk, T. 1994. Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 42, pp.249-284. Dijk, T. 2004. Ideology and discourse. 1st ed. Barcelona: Pompeu Fabra University, pp. 44, 46. Dijk, T. and Kintsch, W. 1983. Strategies of discourse comprehension. 1st ed. New York: Academic Press. Fairclough, N. n.d. Critical discourse analysis. 1st ed. [ebook] Kozani: University of Western Macedonia. Available at: http://semiotics.nured.uowm.gr/pdfs/THEORY_FAIRCLOUGH.pdf [Accessed 11 Jul. 2014]. Grice, P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In: P. Cole and J. Morgan, ed., Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, 1st ed. New York: Academic Press, pp.45-47. Hadi, A. 2013. A critical appraisal of Grices cooperative principle. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 3(1), pp.69-72. Tsuda, S. 1993. Indirectness in discourse: What does it to in conversation?. Intercultural Communication Studies, 3(1), pp.63-74. Unhcr.org. 2014. UNHCR - Hong Kong (Special Administrative Region of China). [online] Available at: http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e488026.html [Accessed 11 Jul. 2014]. Read More