Aligning language to ideology

Abstract

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.

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