Temporal deixis as a participation marker
a case study of the Russian news media
pp. 49-65
in: Oana Andreica, Alin Olteanu (eds), Readings in numanities, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstrakt
This paper aims to locate the connections between media studies and linguistics in regard to the concept of time as an important cultural dimension. The connection point between media studies and linguistics is defined with reference to Marshall McLuhan's media theory and in particular to its division to "hot" and "cool" media. One of the important differences in this division is the degree of participation on the part of the person who consumes a medium: "hot" media allow less participation than "cool". In accordance with McLuhan's terms, new media are "cooler" than traditional media and this also correlates with the tendency to characterize new media culture as a participatory culture. This paper attempts to find out what the temporal features of texts in different media are and if they correspond to the gradation from "hot" to "cool". To achieve this the linguistic concept of deixis is applied as a marker of participation and simultaneousness level in texts. A corpus-based analysis of the words seychas and teper" in the Russian news media showed that deictic temporal expressions were less frequent in the newspaper than that in the radio and TV talks, and it also gave evidence that temporal deictics highlights a higher degree of participation when used together with phrases which express a call to consumer's visual attention.
