A Genre Based Approach to Daytime Talk on Television

Fairclough (1995:3) affirms that the analysis of media language should be recognised as an important element within the research into the contemporary process of social and cultural change. The evolution of mass media runs parallel to that of language, it clearly influences its evolution and it is probably the cause of many changes and innovations that happen in language at both written and spoken level. Marc (1992:44) also believes in the influence and power of the mass media, especially in the power of TV and recalls that in the 1950s television was a medium that put severe limits on subject matter and language. Indeed, media talk has been, for a long time, a popular field for linguistic analysis. As Goffman (1981) points out "for the st