Abstract
This paper shows how the notion of ordinariness is constructed in online journalism
as an object of talk. The discussion draws on corpus-based methods, and focuses on
data collected from the websites of three Israeli newspapers Ha’aretz
(www.haaretz.co.il/), Ynet (www.ynet.co.il/) and NRG (www.nrg.co.il/). Ordinariness
is not an a-priori concept. Rather, it is constructed, or ‘being done’ in
ethnomethodological terms, in and through discourse. The study analyses the
attitudinal features associated with two lexical realisations of ordinariness – ‘the little
citizen’ (ha’ezrax hakatan) and ‘the down-the-road person/citizen’ (haezrax/ha’adam
min hashura), and with the metonymic naming ‘[Mrs] Riki Cohen [from Hadera]’,
employed by the Minister of Finance Yair Lapid to construct the persona of a model
citizen and highly debated in the media. The analysis shows that through discourse
ordinary citizens are positioned as being more or less accountable for their social
actions and as more or less accounted to by members of the (political and journalistic)
elite.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 23-48 |
| Journal | Israel Studies in Language and Society |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| State | Published - 2018 |
Keywords
- ordinariness, accountability, positioning, corpus-based methods, collocations