Anna Łazuka-Banach Narrating Change in Semiotic Terms – A Diachronic Study of the Polish Press Discourse

About this book

Using insights from social semiotics and multimodality, this book examines the linguistic, visual and compositional character of the Polish press between 1944 and 1991, the period which marks several defining moments in Polish history, as well as the era of communism and the breakthrough period of political transformation.

The book primarily aims to demonstrate how political and social change manifested itself at the level of press discourse. Using examples from leading Polish communist and post-communist newspapers, the study offers a detailed description of semiotic resources deployed at the compositional, visual and linguistic levels, and examines their meaning against the changing historical context. As such, it approaches signification in a systematic way and shows how meanings are made and how they can be carried through a variety of modes, thus demonstrating how history and various events in time affect signs and symbols.

The findings show for example, how at certain times the compositional structures served to unambiguously present and propagate certain political/ideological principles or individuals who represented or embodied those ideals. The analysis of visuals in turn, has revealed that the structures of the images contributed to certain representations of for example, those in power, calculated to establish different types of symbolic relationship between the represented and the viewer, depending on the historical/political context of their occurrence. Finally, the ideational analysis of headlines has shown that they played an active role in shaping a particular kind of reality, by for example, emphasizing the position of ordinary people, State institutions and the allied countries as active participants commonly involved in the process of the building a new system.

This social-semiotic multimodal study of newspaper discourse deepens understanding of the role of language within press discourse, and of the ways discourse mediates ideology. The analysis herein has an impact on semiotic theory, particularly regarding the implications for such work across history and time. It also contributes to a general academic debate on the democratizing potential of the media and its agency in general.