Classical Content Analyses (CCA) (Krippendorff, 1980), the number of systematic discourse studies of mass media messages is still limited. The applications of discourse analysis in media research are as varied as the very fields of discourse studies and mass communication themselves.
Much work has a linguistic orientation, such as the early stylistic studies of Leech (1966) and Crystal and Davy (1969), and the later critical linguistics approach of Fowler et al. (1979), Fowler (1991), Kress (1985), and Chilton (1985; 1988), among others. Much of this work, as well as recent work on social semiotics (Hodge and Kress, 1988) has been influenced by Halliday s systemic grammar (Halliday, 1978; 1985).
While also dealing with language, discourse, and images, these approaches are not part of linguistics proper, but pay special attention to ideological and political dimensions of media messages.
Despite the theoretical and ideological diversity of these and other current approaches, we witness increasing integration of linguistic, semiotic, and discourse-analytical approaches (van Dijk, 1985a; Hartley, 1982)
