Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

decode media n. => decoding. mmo ****

decoding the process of making sense of a message and interpreting it according to its relevant codes of interpretation. The term gained a particular currency in television studies following the work of cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall (b. 1932) in which he adopted a semiotic approach to highlight the role of the active audience in relation to the media => encoding. mmo

deconstruction media n. an approach to the interpretation of texts which emphasizes the problematic nature of meaning, especially when this seems to rest upon binary oppositions. A deconstructive approach will seek to expose the underlying hierarchy on which these oppositions are based. mmo

defamation media n. causing injury to a person’s reputation and standing in society by false statements or claims. Just as causing bodily harm to someone by physical action is subject to legal redress, so is making statements that harm an individual’s reputation. In legal circles a distinction is usually made between libel, where the defamatory statement is published in recorded form, and slander, where the defamation is spoken. To be actionable a defamatory statement must be false and deemed capable of lowering the plaintiff in the estimation of right-thinking members of society. mmo

deixis lang n. words or expressions whose precise meaning always depends upon the particular context of their situation. Deictic items in effect point outwards (deixis is derived ultimately from the Greek, ‘to show’) from the text to the extra-linguistic context. They include words such as this, that, here, there, us, you, etc. Deictic items may be seen as falling into three major categories: person deixis such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he/she/it’, ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, ‘us’, ‘ours’, ‘them’, ‘theirs’; temporal deixis such as ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘yesterday’, ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’; and place deixis such as ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘away’, ‘this’, ‘that’.

Part of the interest of such apparently commonplace items is the way in which they shift their meaning from context to context by referring to different entities: thus ‘I’ refers to whoever is speaking at the moment of utterance. This can pose problems during early language development. Precisely because the referent is always shifting, children take time to identify the meaning of deictic terms and can mistakenly reverse their application, saying for example, ‘pick you up, Daddy’ instead of ‘pick me up, Daddy’.

Deixis is also interesting for the way in which it raises crucially important issues about language and meaning. Consideration of deictic terms helps to show how the meaning of many utterances does not reside purely in the words themselves, but depends also upon the context in which the words are uttered. For it is only by reference to context that we can recover the particular meaning of particular deictic expressions. mmo