Meanings And Representation: Rep + Variations

Question 1

What is hegemony?

Answer 1

• How 1 social group can use language to get other people to accept its way of seeing the World as natural.
• E.g. the way immigration/immigrants are represented in some newspapers / in the media (esp by right-wing newspapers).
  
  • Immigrants represented as ‘invaders’.

Question 2

What is ideology?

Answer 2

• A set of of related ideas. These can consist of labels, values, beliefs, doctrines, myths.
• Can be articulated explicitly, as in the case of political ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism and socialism.
• A text producer may attempt to project a certain series of beliefs on to a text receiver who is positioned as an implied or ideal reader so that they are invited to share these ways of thinking about the world.

Question 3

What does it mean to stigmatise someone?

Answer 3

• to mark something or someone out as disgraceful or shameful.
• Ethnicity can be used as a way of stereotyping and stigmatising social groups, John Harris’s definition of ‘chav’ includes a reference to people’s ethnicity, ‘white’, as well as their social class.

Question 4

What is reappropriating?

Answer 4

• Reclaiming a word or phrase that has come to mean something insulting and using it as if it is normal or even complimentary.
  
  • E.g. some gays and lesbians have reappropriate the slurs ‘fag and dyke’.
  • some black people have reappropriated the N word, especially in hip-hop culture.

Question 5

What is semantic derogation?

Answer 5

• The sense of negative meaning or connotation that some lexical items have attached to them.
• E.g. some terms reserved for women, have strong negative connotations when compared to the corresponding term for men, such as:
  
  • mistress (female), master (male)
  • spinster (female), bachelor (male)
  • courtesan (female), courtier (male)

Question 6

What is semantic deterioration?

Answer 6

• The process by which negative connotations become attached to lexical items.
  
  • E.g. whilst ‘lord’ still suggests high status, ‘lady’ is more widely used and has undergone semantic deterioration: ‘dinner lady’ and ‘cleaning lady’ (contrast with ‘cleaning lord’).
  • ‘lewd’ used to mean ‘non-ecclesiastical (not relating to the Christian church or clergy), lay’, now means ‘sexually insinuating’.