Final ILS week with two stars in their fields

 

04 February 2025, 6.15-7.15 p.m.
Prof. Dr. Martin Luginbühl (University of Basel, Switzerland)

Medial shaping of war reporting: A comparison of European TV news shows covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Using the example of war reporting in television news from Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland on the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the lecture will examine the extent to which the multimodal design (Wildfeuer et al. 2020) of the contributions of different programmes differs. A particular focus will be on the question of the extent to which entertaining reporting can also be observed in such events. In numerous media linguistic and media studies, entertainment is associated with light-heartedness, distraction and pleasure (e.g. Klein 1997, 1998, but also McQuail/Deuze 2020). However, many of the characteristics cited in these studies (e.g. emotional ‚closeness', suspense, spectacularity, pace, etc.) can also be related to events and forms of presentation that are serious, stressful or frightening (Burger/Luginbühl 2014, Wirth 2013). Entertainment is interpreted as a specific form of ‘media shaping’ (Luginbühl 2019).
After a brief localisation of television news within media and genre studies, an operationalisation of ‘entertainment’ follows, which does not necessarily focus on light-heartedness, but more generally sees the aim of evoking emotions as a constitutive feature of entertaining content and presentation methods. The focus is then on the detailed analysis of selected examples. Entertainment cues are analysed (in the form of ‘text usefulness cues’, Hausendorf et al. 2017), which are established with different modalities and their coordination in form of different gestalts, which can be related the journalistic cultures of different shows.

 

07 February 2025, 4,15-5.15 p.m.
Prof. Terry Janzen, PhD (University of Manitoba, Canada)

When the past is in front of you: Revisiting past spaces in American Sign Language

There is a longstanding notion in ASL linguistics and pedagogy of a spatial “time line” that stretches from the past as behind the signer to the future well in front of the signer. Individual time signs are seen as following this spatially-oriented frame: signs representing past times tend to move backwards, and signs representing the future move forwards, from the orientation of the signer. But if the past is conceptualized as behind the signer, what happens in narrative sequences when the signer elaborates past events? According to a small corpus of ASL discourse that includes a number of narrative passages, the past is regularly represented in the space directly in front of the signer. This talk discusses, and attempts to reconcile, these two differential spaces for past events.