Langue and parole
tion, 1956. In ‘Towards a general model of
communication’ in Audio-Visual Communica-
tion Review, 4 (1956), George Gerbner off ers the
following formula:
1 Someone
2 perceives an event
3 and reacts
4 in a situation
5 through some means
6 to make available materials
7 in some form
8 and context
9 conveying content
10 with some consequence.
See topic guide under communication
models.
Latitudes of acceptance and rejection Th e
greater the gap between an attitude a person
already holds and that which another wants
to persuade him/her to adopt, the less likely it
is that any shift in attitude will occur. Carol W.
Sherif in Attitudes and Attitude Change (Green-
wood Press, 1982) argues that our responses to
attempts to challenge or change our attitudes are
divided into three main types: (1) An individual’s
latitude of acceptance contains the opinions,
ideas and so on about an issue that a person is
ready to agree with or accept; (2) Th e latitude of
non-commitment contains the range of opinions
and ideas on the same issue that the individual
is neutral about; (3) The latitude of rejection
contains those ideas and opinions about an issue
that the individual fi nds unacceptable. Further,
unacceptable statements tend to be interpreted
as even more hostile and unfavourable than they
really are – the contrast eff ect; while those that
are not far removed from the latitude of accep-
tance may gradually be incorporated into it – the
assimilation eff ect. See boomerang effect.
Laugh track Recorded laughter used on radio
and TV programmes, chiefly sitcoms (see
sitcom). It functions as a stimulus to audience
laughter with the hint that all of us listening
or watching are fi nding the programme funny.
There is no room on the laugh track for the
dissenting sounds of those who wish to express
a contrary view.
In The Sitcom (Edinburgh University Press,
2010), Brett Mills writes that the laugh track
‘presents the audience as a mass, whose
responses are unambiguous and who signal
a collective understanding of what is or isn’t
funny’. It ‘not only ignores alternative readings
of a comedy text, but also suggests there is
pleasure to be had in going along with the rest
of the crowd’. In other words, it has ideologicalfor adapting to the environment and for commu-
nicating’. Hence language pollution occurs.
The authors identify three main types of
language pollution and their common char-
acteristics: confusion (unknown meanings),
characterized by the use of foreign languages,
unfamiliar words, technical jargon and
misused terminology; ambiguity (too many
meanings), characterized by vagueness, the use
of words with multiple defi nitions and the use of
very general imprecise statements, or terms; and
deception (obscured meanings), characterized by
outright lies, distortion, and giving incomplete
information or non-answers to questions.
Langue and parole In his Cours de Linguistique
Générale (1916), published after his death, Ferdi-
nand de Saussure (1857–1914) defi ned La langue,
or language, as a system, while La parole repre-
sented the actual manifestations of language in
speech and writing. Th e former he conceived as
an ‘institution’, a set of interpersonal rules and
norms; the latter, events or instances, taking
their meaning from, or giving meaning to, the
system.
▶De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (English
translation; Fontana/Collins, 1974).
Lasswell’s model of communication, 1948 A
questioning device rather than an actual model
of the communication process, Harold Lasswell’s
fi ve-point approach to the analysis of the mass
media has nevertheless given enduring service.
It remains a useful fi rst step in interpreting the
transmission and reception of messages.
In ‘The structure and function of commu-
nication in society’ in Lymon Bryson, ed., Th e
Communication of Ideas (Harper & Row, 1948)
Lasswell suggests that in order to arrive at a due
understanding of the meaning systems of mass
communication, the following sequence of
questions might be put:
Who
Says what
In which channel
To whom
With what eff ect?
Assuming that the last question would include
the notion of feedback, Lasswell’s model could
still do with an additional question: in what
context (social, economic, cultural, political,
aesthetic) is the communication process taking
place? Also Lasswell makes no provision for
intervening variables (ivs), those mediat-
ing factors that impact on the ways in which
messages are received and responded to. It is
useful to compare Lasswell’s list to the verbal
version of gerbner’s model of communica-