A Study of Gossip Columns in the Context of Stylistics and Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Gossip columns about celebrities published in daily newspapers are a genre type not sufficiently studied from the point of linguistics. Gossip as information about an absent person, which is shared among people, is a common way of communication. Contexts which are formed by either oral or written, directly or by a means of communication are channels conveying information about people around us. Today celebrities such as politicians, models, actors/actresses, people at TV show programs, athletes and others have become a part of our social network through the media (Schely-Newman 2004). Within the context of this paper, gossip columns published in some Turkish daily newspapers are analyzed from the point of stylistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA). Although different gossip columnists are expected to have different styles, the results of this research show that they have almost the same style. From the point of critical discourse analysis, Bergmann’s (1993) basic triad of gossip interaction – gossiper, gossipee and audience – is applied to “identities”, seen by Fairclough (1995) as a major issue to be addressed in analyzing media texts. This application can be summarized as: gossiper = the column as persona, gossipee = selected celebrities, audience = readers. The function of gossip column where this application is found is to remind the society members of the social norms and values (Levin and Arluke 1987). The basic idea of analysis from the point of CDA is that the relation between power and ideology presented to the readers through selected linguistic features can be found out. As a result of this study, the columnists are found to see themselves as the protector of social norms; in order to carry out this task, the columnist mentions between lines what should or should not be done by showing what a celebrity did. Another result of this analysis is that these texts have the features of both oral and written texts; moreover, they have an informal style. In other words, the columnists create these written texts by using the features of oral texts.