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Book Review: Martin Conboy, The Language of Newspapers: Socio-Historical

Perspectives. London and New York: Continuum, 2010.

Article in Discourse & Society · January 2011

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Book reviews 649

In Chapter 4, Homoláč puts his construct of the two interpretative repertoires to the
test – by analysing two internet discussions following two news articles (on Roma migra-
tion from Slovakia to the Czech Republic and on the winning of a young Roma in a song
contest). He points out the universal validity of certain discursive practices employed by
the participants while maintaining their unique features, such as their intense link with
non-discursive practices (for example, with potential acts of violence). Among the most
important, though perhaps not the most surprising, findings is the fact that the discus-
sants attributed negative predicates to members of the Roma category, and used them as
resources for justifying particular non-discursive practices (such as not letting Roma in)
or as an argumentative tactic to build the relational pair ‘us’ and ‘them’.
In the final chapter, Homoláč reasserts his analytical stance in which he attempts to
bridge the Foucauldian understanding of discourse as a type of social practice and
approaches utilizing the analytical toolbox of ethnomethodological conversation analysis.
The internet discussions under analysis provide unique material for the examination
of online sociology as practised by the participants who, being lay sociologists, catego-
rize others, themselves and entities they talk about, and adopt stances from which they
argue or act. Homoláč successfully manages to detect the link between discursive and
non-discursive dimensions of social practice which influence each other recursively:
non-discursive practices find their way into discourses, which may further incite cer-
tain non-discursive acts. The pointing out of the intricate ways in which these non-
discursive practices and discursive practices may be mutually intertwined is the major
contribution of Homoláč´s book. If the ultimate task of such analysis is to offer solu-
tions to social problems, Homoláč has undoubtedly managed to do so, and that is by his
thorough investigation of the dynamics of discursive practice within the defined scope
of interaction.

Martin Conboy, The Language of Newspapers: Socio-Historical Perspectives. London and

New York: Continuum, 2010. viii + 176 pp. £75.00 (hbk), £24.99 (pbk).

Reviewed by: Claire E. Scott, Language Centre, Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia

In this book, Martin Conboy, who has made several other significant contributions to the
literature on journalism history in the last decade, continues to discuss the broad theme
that has occupied him in his previous books – that the history of the media is relevant to
understanding its contemporary structures and processes and its relationship to society.
The story of news development told in this book is largely the same as that in Conboy’s
earlier book, Journalism: A Critical History (2004), but here Conboy moves a degree
away from the core of the historical narrative to suggest the linguistic consequences of
that history. He focuses on the language of newspapers in Britain and the socio-cultural
conditions that have shaped it over time. His stated aim is to ‘provide an outline of the
changes in the language of newspapers in the context of the sociolinguistic debates
[which he outlines] and the importance of those changes to the societies they were
­produced for and which they structured in the process of reporting them’ (p. 11).
650 Discourse & Society 22(5)

Conboy’s account proceeds from a view of journalism as a discourse in context (p. 9;

cf. Conboy, 2004: 3–4), in which the language of news ‘has impacted upon social and
political debates over four centuries’ (p. 1) just as political and social changes have
influenced the use of language.
Like earlier histories of news, Conboy organizes his account chronologically. His
focus throughout is on the language of British newspapers, but there is some concession
to the differences between the British and American press, and the influence of the
American on the British in the 19th century, with Chapter 5 addressing the American
trends and influence specifically. The seven chapters are organized around the particular
personalities, institutions and events that Conboy sees as having most strongly influ-
enced the linguistically relevant shifts in the direction of news production and content.
For example, Conboy argues that 1855 was a key date (p. 91) as it marked the lifting of
taxes on newspapers, which allowed more and cheaper newspapers to be established and
to reach a wider audience, and these tended to adopt a less ‘elitist’, more vernacular lan-
guage style as a result. This also coincided with the commercial use of telegraphy and the
increased authority that newspapers gained by having access to up-to-date world news.
A shift from anonymity to celebration of individual journalists is also discussed as a
consequence of these technological, political and demographic changes. Conboy argues
that owners and editors of newspapers (particularly the elite ones) had previously
believed ‘that argument could be won and opinion moulded without recourse to the
personal reputation of the writer’ (p. 93) and had therefore taken a more homogenized
approach to the framing of coverage. He claims that ‘the gradual demise of anonymity
was a significant element in the growth of the related trends of personalization and
popularization in the newspaper which would continue to drive developments in their
language and their overall approach to readerships throughout the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries’ (p. 94). Unfortunately, the language developments that actually
came about in this way are not specified in Conboy’s account, so it is difficult to judge
the validity of that claim. However, my own linguistic research on the reporting of the
conclusion of wars in the Sydney Morning Herald from 1901 to 2003 found lexico-
grammatical evidence that pointed to a shift towards the individualization of the
journalist over that period (Scott, 2008).
Although the title of the book and its placement in the ‘Advances in Sociolinguistics’
series suggest that it would present a linguistic account, it is actually very much in the
nature of a historical account. There is no setting out of linguistic evidence, no empirical
analysis of language; the closest it gets to a presentation of linguistic evidence is the use
of examples – headlines, extracts of past newspaper writings, etc. – to illustrate the dis-
cussion. The discussion of language mainly focuses on ‘style’ and themes, e.g. the
semantic preoccupations of tabloids.
On the other hand, the book is helpful in terms of understanding changes in the seman-
tic preoccupations of the news in different periods, and how these were motivated by the
socio-political context. It demonstrates the need for more fruitful dialogue between lin-
guists and media historians, in which each contributes their complementary expertise
(linguistic modelling and analysis, or historical understanding) to allow a richer picture
of the history of the language of the news.
Book reviews 651

References
Conboy M (2004) Journalism: A Critical History. London: SAGE.
Scott C (2008) Reporting armistice: Authorial and non-authorial voices in The Sydney Morning
Herald 1902–2003. In: Wu C, Matthiessen CMIM and Herke M (eds) Proceedings of ISFC 35:
Voices Around the World, 131–136. Sydney: The 35th ISFC Organizing Committee.

Jan Blommaert, The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
xvi + 213 pp.

Reviewed by: Vahid Parvaresh, Department of English, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of
Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

Jan Blommaert’s The Sociolinguistics of Globalization brings to light how sociolin-

guistics should be ‘the study of language as a complex of resources, of their value,
distribution, rights of ownership and effects’ (p. 28). The book is divided into seven
chapters, the main aim of which is to address translocal, mobile markets that reveal
changeable boundaries.
The writer’s main impetus is, as stated in the first chapter, to unthink and rethink
sociolinguistics’ classic distinctions and biases by setting an eye on mobile resources,
‘framed in terms of trans-contextual networks, flows and movements’ (p. 1). For the
author, this sociolinguistics of mobility stands in contrast to the long established socio-
linguistics of distribution, in which movement of language resources is seen as move-
ment in chronological time and stable space. As a consequence, Blommaert is concerned
not with languages but with what he calls ‘concrete resources’ (p. 5, original emphasis).
His focus is on the indexical value that particular linguistic resources have in certain
­situations and spaces.
In Chapter 2, drawing on several examples, the author reveals how events and pro-
cesses occur at different scale levels. Blommaert contends that the study of the interac-
tion between scales should be a core feature of understanding globalization. As discussed
by the author, scales should be understood as dimensions at which forms of normativity
are organized. In this vein, ‘order of indexicality’ is introduced, enabling the author to
point a finger at aspects of power and inequality. Additionally, the author introduces the
term ‘polycentricity’ as a substitute for the term ‘multivocality’ in order to move the
analysis ‘from the descriptive to the interpretive level’ and to emphasize ‘the hierarchical
systems of value for semiotic resources’ (p. 41).
Chapter 3, the book’s longest chapter, places an emphasis on flows, movements and
trajectories so as to show the relative situatedness and spatiality of culture. To achieve
this aim, Blommaert considers, inter alia, the Swahili novel, The Invisible Enterprises of
the Patriots, published in Tanzania (Ruhumbika, 1992). Blommaert’s analysis of the
novel leads the reader to rethink the idea that globalization equals uniformization.
In the next chapter, the author further tries to substantiate the claim that a sociolin-
guistics of globalization should address mobile resources and domains rather than
immobile languages. The author’s purpose in Chapter 5 is to put forth the idea that
over-interpretation of the synchronic plane of sociolinguistic phenomena is avoidable if

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