ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the development of research into media language and discourse in relation to foundational linguistic approaches to language in society topics that have more come to bear with the evolution of digital media and deals with reflection on future directions for productive pursuit. While construction grammar is in many ways a retooling of existing work in the some areas, the emphasis on family resemblance in linguistic structures is distinctive and deserves to be integrated into existing ways of studying news. It remains to be discovered precisely how news in its linguistic mode is recognized as news, tested for credibility, and integrated into the mental models. Most linguists consider media or news data from the perspective of discourse structure or linguistic function. In practice, systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) is often joined in a single theoretical complex with critical discourse analysis (CDA), with the theoretical reach of CDA complementing the grammatical precision of SFL.
