Media Linguistics: Emergence, Contemporary Trends and Recommendations for Development in the Republic of Croatia

This paper describes media linguistics, a linguistic discipline which studies the relationship between language and the media, i. e. which analyses how mass media professionals employ language to depict reality (Perrin 2015). The discipline was established in the late 20th and early 21st century, when it was given a name in English, German and Russian language. However, research on the language of the media had been conducted before that time. The representatives of critical linguistics (e.g. Fowler, Hodge, Tress and Krew 1979) and critical discourse analysis (e.g. van Dijk 1985, 1988) observed how language means are employed to promote political ideology in the media. Later linguists such as Bell (1991), Jucker (1992) or Fairclough (1995) shifted the focus from ideology to the analysis of lexical, syntactic and pragmatic properties of media texts. Today, media linguistics collaborates with other disciplines in conducting multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research studies. In those studies, researchers carry out language and discourse analyses of media texts, categorize texts into genres and group genres into categories on the basis of function or some other property. Th ey also compare texts and examine their genesis as well as the audience's reaction to them. Th is paper off ers several suggestions for the development of media linguistics in the Republic of Croatia, starting with the adoption of the proposed Croatian name medijska lingvistika. . Among other things, it proposes the development of courses about media linguistics as a part of study programmes in the fields of philology and communication science as well a closer co-operation between linguists and communication scientists in studies about the language of the media. Further, it recommends broadening the focus of research to understudied genres and applying the methods of media linguistics to studies about the genesis of media texts in the Croatian language.