Pragmatics and Society 2/2010 [antikvár]

Media intertextualities Semiotic mediation across time and space Mie Hiramoto and Joseph Sung-Yul Park 1. Introduction The semiotic concept of intertextuality (originally due to Mikhail Bakhtin; 1986/2006) was popularized in the West by Júlia Kristeva (1980), who refers to it as various connections in form and content which bond a text to other texts; the central insight here is that each text exists in relation to other texts. She speaks of texts in terms of two axes; one is a 'horizontal axis' linking the creator and audience of a text while the other is a Verticai axis' which links the text to other texts (Kristeva 1980:69). These two axes are connected through shared codes across time and space, meaning that every text and every meaning depends on preexisting codes. This intertextual perspective is crucial for our understanding of how média representations of speakers and languages shape many of our preconceptions of others. Mediatization of people, ideas, and discourses - that is, the process through which the média organizes and orients the perception and interpretation of social roles and values (Johnson and Ensslin 2007) - is constantly at work in our construction and interpretation of social identity. Mediatization is inherently intertextual (see Agha and Wortham 2005); the very nature of this process involves extracting the speech behavior of particular speakers or groups from a highly specific context and refracting and reshaping it to be inserted in another stream of representations (Bauman and Briggs 1990, Briggs and Bauman 1992, Silverstein and Úrban 1996). For this same reason it is alsó dialogic; the way in which mediatized images and ideologies are interpreted by recipients ultimately contributes to the construction of more enduring stereotypes and evaluations of the speakers and languages represented through those texts (Spitulnik 1996, Inoue 2003, Agha 2007).