A collection of linguistic approaches to the study of pop culture

Abstract

The Language of Pop Culture (LPC) edited by Valentin Werner is a collection of quality articles that aims to raise awareness in LPC as a domain of linguistics research. Through showcasing relevant methods of analysis, this book provides useful examples for both language researchers and educators. This volume comprises five parts and an epilogue. Part I: Context consists of two important chapters that form the backbone of this volume. Werner, its editor, sets the scene in chapter 1 by asserting that ‘the language of pop culture (LPC) represents an understudied subject area – both in general and in linguistics as an empirical scholarly discipline’ (p. 3). The author contextualises the linguistic study of LPC, providing an in-depth discussion on the distinction between pop culture (PC) and popular culture and arriving at a working definition for this volume. Werner also outlines the previous research and methodologies used in LPC, and presents arguments supporting the application of PC in foreign language teaching. Trotta’s chapter 2 argues that an adequate study of LPC should both look into linguistic aspects as well as its nature and impact on humanities, and ‘explore . . . LPC not only as linguistic data but also as the study of language that is embedded in the larger processes of representation and dissemination via the many forms of PC we experience every day.’ (p. 29) The author notes that LPC, when presented in studies, is generally not the core element of inquiry, but included among examples of other lexicogrammatical and discourse focuses. To facilitate the discussion of LPC, he introduces various definitions of PC, and presents three concepts for the study of LPC: mutual feedback, Social Cognitive Theory, and representation. He discusses the difference between mediated and mediatized language (ML) and compares LPC and ML. Chapters 3 and 4 make up Part II: Comics. In chapter 3, Walshe explores the multilingualism/linguicism, which is the ‘perpetuating monolingual, [A]nglocentric prejudices and negative stereotyping of other languages and their speakers’ (Bleichenbacher, 2007, as cited in Walshein in that chapter). He first compares research findings from Bleichenbacher’s film corpus with those in the author’s comic corpus, then utilises an adapted version of Bleichenbacher’s (2007: 12) matrix of four different communicative situations to analyse Marvel Comics, focusing on how comic authors and illustrators handle multilingual situations (i.e., the presence of non-English speeches) in comics. These strategies include elimination, signalisation, evocation, and presence. Chapter 4 looks into the linguistic aspect of the discourse in web comics. Bramlett explores the interconnections between the main comic strip, the alt-text (i.e., the content of an image if it fails to load on a website), and the hidden comic (i.e., a comic that appears via a mouseover event or an extra mouse click). The author’s demonstration provides an additional methodological approach for researchers of web comics. Chapters 5 and 6 form Part III: Music and Lyrics. In chapter 5, Westphal adopts an ethnographic approach to the investigation of German reggae subculture and the spread of Jamaican Creole in PC. The author analyses a wide range of multimodal resources at an outdoor reggae event in Germany, including the performances, lyrics, artists’ accents, the event’s space, the language use of the German performers,