The Rhetoric of Mass Communication and Media in the Contrastive Sociolinguistics

Abstract

In the field of mass communication and media, the use of language has become so versatile that it can help to improve relationship between peoples, but it can somehow have a negative effect on the mutual understanding. Rhetoric makes it clear and persuasive to communicate to make language work for their purposes. Sociolinguistics in the contrastive analysis deals with speech communities and the language use in particular contexts such as dialects or bilingualism in society and language variation and change over time, especially in the post-COVID-19 era. This chapter presents Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory and William Labov's sociolinguistic method, analyzing genres and registers in the systemic functional linguistics perspective to derive a conceptual framework for the study of news report. The resulting framework provides for the identification of news writing style in mass media and other social networks and its performance in language use regarding the power of words to avoid the ambiguity in situational contexts and to better interpersonal and intercultural communication.