"Our biggest killer": multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press
"Our biggest killer": multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press
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DOI：
10.1080/10350330.2017.1345111
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发表时间：
2018-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2
通讯作者：
Dening, Tom
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Brookes, Gavin;Harvey, Kevin;Dening, Tom
国家统计局最近（2016年）的一份报告指出，痴呆症现在是英格兰和威尔士的主要死亡原因。英国媒体一直专注于这种综合症（一个永远有新闻价值的话题），很快就对这份公告做出了回应，一致地将痴呆症列为国家最大的杀手，同时用扭曲和情绪化的隐喻术语（重新）制定报告的其他方面。在本文中，我们研究如何媒体，通过使用一套反复出现的语言和视觉符号学比喻，描绘痴呆症作为一个代理实体，一个杀手，这是一个自我攻击的受害者。我们认为，这样一种广泛的、耸人听闻的表述，不仅将痴呆症解释为一种可怕的、有害的疾病，而且，至关重要的是，模糊了人们理解和体验这种综合征的个人和社会背景（尤其是痴呆症患者自己）。这种强烈的耸人听闻的表现形式不仅没有解决老年歧视的错误信息和常见的误解，而且还可能加剧痴呆症患者及其家人经常经历的压力和抑郁。
A recent (2016) Office for National Statistics report stated that dementia is now the leading cause of death in England and Wales. Ever fixated with the syndrome (an unfailingly newsworthy topic), the British press was quick to respond to the bulletin, consistently headlining that dementia was the nation's biggest killer, while (re)formulating other aspects of the report in distorting and emotive metaphorical terms. In this paper we examine how the media, through use of a recurring set of linguistic and visual semiotic tropes, portrayed dementia as an agentive entity, a killer, which remorselessly attacks its victims. Such a broadly loaded and sensationalist representation, we argue, not only construed dementia as a direful and pernicious disease, but also, crucially, obscured the personal and social contexts in which the syndrome is understood and experienced (not least by people with dementia themselves). This intensely lurid type of representation not only fails to address the ageist misinformation and common misunderstandings that all too commonly surround dementia, but is also likely to exacerbate the stress and depression frequently experienced by people with dementia and their families.