ABSTRACT
Representation, in the Press as in all other kinds of media and discourse, is a constructive practice. Events and ideas are not communicated neutrally, in their natural structure, as it were. They could not be, because they have to be transmitted through some medium with its own structural features, and these structural features are already impregnated with social values which make up a potential perspective on events. Linguistics is said to be concerned, not with real people using language, but with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. The anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf advanced a strong series of claims concerning the variable effects of the structures of different languages on the conceptions of reality peculiar to different speech-communities.
