КАРАКТЕРИСТИКЕ МЕДИЈСКОГ ДИСКУРСА НА ТЕМУ СРБИЈЕ И ЕВРОПСКЕ УНИЈЕ
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MEDIA DISCOURSE ON SERBIA AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

Summary/Abstract: The subject of this paper is a multimodal presentation of the European Union through written texts published by the media, from Serbian speaking areas, between 2004 and 2014. The analysis of multimodal means was conducted from a social semiotic perspective, by applying multimodal critical discourse analysis, which implies an analysis of the coordinated use of diverse semiotic resources such as language, images, colours and gestures. All the elements whose function is to produce a particular effect on a heterogeneous group of readers or viewers were analysed. The aim of this study is to interpret the manifestation of the European Union ideology in contemporary media in a new way. Therefore, a particular selection of multimodal texts related to this topic was made. The theoretical and methodological framework of the research is critical discourse analysis which deals with language as a form of social practice, which means that it views language within its social context. Since this paper looks at a media discourse of the data collected from the Serbian language, the principle of statistics was applied. As a result, significant information was isolated in the use of language and multimodal elements. In corpus analysis, methods based on hermeneutics were used, particularly the ‘hermeneutic circle’, in which pre-understanding ensures understanding, and prior understanding of the text is being corrected and updated with subsequent understanding of the whole (part-whole relation; whole-individual part relation). The corpus analysis is accompanied by corresponding statistical measures which, expressed both numerically and as a percentage, refer to the representation and frequency of the chosen language and multimodal units in the analysed texts. The research was conducted on the corpus consisting of texts published by the most eminent domestic agencies, publishing or media houses, which were chronologically analysed in order to establish whether the social and political changes in Serbia were reflected in the discourse of the European Union. All the elements of the texts, both language and multimodal, were analysed on the basis of a defined plan and research model made of a three-layer text analysis which comprises a) analysis of language (linguistic analysis), b) image analysis accompanying the discourse and c) gesture analysis (the body language of people in pictures). As all the analysed texts from Serbian speaking areas, show a certain degree of ‘patternising’ in regards to the use of multimodal elements and attitude towards the European Union presented in a text (affirmative, neutral and negative), this paper presents conceptual patterns of texts. The theoretical contribution of this research paper represents the establishing of mathematical correlations which lead to the conclusion that a text message is more precisely encoded if it is followed by multimodal means, and that the greater amount of information obtained by multimodal resources contributes to the intensifying of a text message meaning. Considering the defined relations between multimodal elements and texts, as well as the identified forms and patterns of multimodal texts, this paper can contribute to the creation of diverse marketing materials.

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