Page 214 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

REGISTER

to subject-oriented, communication, whether via speech, writing or
audio-visual production, tends towards greater redundancy. Scientific
papers in specialist journals strive for lowredundancy, but are very
hard to read. Mass communication, it follows, is highly redundant in
these terms, but it is not by that token ‘dumbed down’; it is, rather,
sensitive to the fact that audiences do not share codes with
communicators or with each other.

REFERENT

A term used in semiotic analysis that describes what the sign stands
for; whether an event, a condition or an object. The referent is a part
of the signifying system of language, rather than a property of the
independently existing external world of nature. So, for instance, there
are beaches the world over, with various identifiable properties, but the
referent of the word ‘beach’ will differ in different languages,
depending on both the structure of the language and the historical
significance of the beach in that culture.

REGISTER

Stylistic variation in language according to its context of situation. The
selection of words and structures by the language user is influenced
strongly by features of the situation. Indeed, utterances typically carry
the imprint of their context so markedly and we are so attuned to
contextual variation that we can often infer features of the original
context of situation from quite fragmentary, isolated linguistic
examples. For instance, most readers will feel confident that they
can reconstruct the original context of situation for the following
examples:

(1) I’m going to give you a prescription for the pain.

(2) NewTubifast. The tubular dressing retention bandage.
No sticking. No tying. No pinning.

And so it will come as no surprise to hear that (1) is from a
doctor–patient interviewand (2) from a magazine advertisement.
What is more difficult to explain is howwe recognise the original

199