Newspaper discourse informalisation: a diachronic comparison from keywords (original) (raw)
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Fundamental evaluative adjective patterns in british broadsheet and tabloid newspaper discourse
ACC Journal
News discourse has been analysed from different angles including the critical approach, stylistic approach, corpus-linguistic approach, cognitive approach, diachronic approach, socio-linguistic approach etc. [1]. Yet, these approaches do not focus on analysing attitude/evaluation as such. That is why this study sets out to explore and compare expressing attitude/evaluation via two lexicogrammatical patterns which were identified by Hunston and Sinclair [2] and amended by Bednarek [3]. The adjective lexicogrammatical patterns 'it v-link ADJ finite/non-finite clause' and 'v-link ADJ prep' seem to be the most prominent carriers of evaluative language in a corpus of six British English online 'popular' and 'quality' newspapers. The paper compares not only the frequency of the patterns in the corpus but also the differences in the use of the patterns between the quality and popular newspapers.
Lexical Profile of Newspapers Revisited: A Corpus-Based Analysis
Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
The present study analyzed the vocabulary profile of the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, which contained 12 billion words from online newspapers and magazines in 20 countries to determine the vocabulary knowledge needed to reasonably understand online newspaper and magazine articles. The results showed that, in general, knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 word families in the British National Corpus/ Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) wordlist plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds and acronyms was necessary to gain 95% coverage for the NOW corpus. However, when it came to the 98% coverage, online newspaper and magazine articles from different countries had relatively distinct lexical demands. In-depth analyses were carried out and the findings offered comprehensive insights into the issue. Implications for teaching and learning were also provided.
Corpora, 2010
This edition of Corpora contains one of the first ever collections of papers pertaining to the nascent discipline of Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS). This discipline is characterised by the novelty both of its methodology and the topics it is consequently in a position to treat. It employs relatively large corpora of a parallel structure and content from different moments of contemporary time (in the present case the SiBol corpora, see below) in order to track changes in modern language usage but also social, cultural and political changes over modern times, as reflected in language. In this overview I will attempt to give an idea of what both corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and MD-CADS involve, to provide some information about the newspaper corpora we employ, and to outline methodologies commonly followed in this area, including by the other contributors to the collections. I will also present two sets of practical analyses. The first is inductive and bottom-up, deriving from a close analysis of the comparative keywords generated by comparing the lists of items from the two parallel corpora from different time periods, the aim being to uncover changes over time both in language and in what social political and cultural issues were considered worthy of attention. The second is more intuitive and hypothesis-driven, the hypothesis being that an examination of a certain term, namely moral panic, can shed some light on which issues writers thought did not merit all the attention they were receiving. I will conclude with brief sketches of the other papers in the collection and ruminations on the relevance of MD-CADS in both language research and teaching.
The Use of Language in Newspapers
English newspaper writing dates from the 17th century. The first newspapers carried only news, without comments, as commenting was considered to be against the principles of journalism. By the 19th century, newspaper language was recognized as a particular variety of style, characterized by a specific communicative purpose and its own system of language means. It includes a system of interrelated lexical, phraseological and grammatical means serving the purpose of informing, instructing and, in addition, of entertaining the reader. As a result of this diversity of purposes, newspapers contain not only strictly informational, but also evaluative material -comments and views of the news-writers, especially characteristic of editorials and feature articles.
In: Evaluation in Context. Eds. Geoff Thompson & Laura Alba-Juez. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2014
This paper investigates the expression of evaluation in a corpus collected from weekly news magazines in English in an attempt to address two main research questions. These concern, first, the linguistic patterns that are regularly associated with the expression of evaluation in this written register and, second, the place of evaluative expressions in this discourse type and the subsequent implications for the organisation of the text.