ABSTRACT
Form of public communication conditioned by technical means of communication such as the press, radio, film, and television. Mass communication is characterized by a high degree of communicative distance between a heterogeneous ‘audience’ and a group of anonymous ‘communicators’ (announcers, copy writers, moderators, editors, producers) who direct the communication process in different ways. An important aspect of this communicative structure is the asymmetrical distribution of the speaker/hearer roles that precludes a direct interchange between the participants and may consequently bring about confusion with regard to the intentions and effects of communication (‘one-way communication’). The particular conditions, structures, and effects of mass communication are studied in several disciplines, for example, communication science, sociology, political science, and information theory. The goal of linguistic research, in particular that of text linguistics, is to describe particular text types such as interviews, news reports, or other forms of journalistic language, to analyze the characteristic mixture of informative, entertaining, and persuasive text functions (as is the case for advertising language), or to analyze political speeches using the methods of statistical linguistics, content analysis, argumentation theory, stylistics, or rhetoric.
