News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis (Second Edition)

Udo Fries · Nicholas Brownlees · Roberto Facchinetti

Oct 2015 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Ebook

250

Pages

Eligible

About this ebook

The updated and revised edition of this volume maintains its focus on the dialectic interrelation between ‘news’ and ‘change’. News is intended as a textual type in its evolutionary – and revolutionary – development, while change is discussed with reference to the form, content and structure of news texts. The news texts in question range from the first forms of periodical news in the seventeenth century up to the news blogs and social media of the present day.

Divided into four chapters, representing key historical moments in the process of news writing, each chapter makes use of a set of corpora specifically designed to suit the needs of scholars working in those particular fields. Topics that the authors examine include pronominal usage and the interrelationship between news writer and reader, heads and headlines, the language of advertisements and other text classes, the trend towards conversationalization, and impartiality and ‘perspective’ in modern-day news.

These and other topics, coupled with the varying corpora that are exploited to analyse them, call into question basic methodological issues that are examined from different perspectives. Throughout the volume, the authors contextualise the news publications of the day so as to better understand the continuous process of adjustment and renewal that news texts are subject to over time.

About the author

Roberta Facchinetti is Professor of English Language at the University of Verona. Her main research interests, which are supported by the use of computerised corpora of both synchronic and diachronic English, focus on media linguistics, lexicography and ESP. On these subjects she has authored, co-authored and edited various books and articles, including “English in social media: A linguistic analysis of tweets” (2015), “Newsroom jargon at the crossroads of corpus linguistics and lexicography” (2014) and A Cultural Journey through the English Lexicon (2012).

Nicholas Brownlees is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Florence. He is the co-compiler of the Florence Early English Newspapers Corpus, and has written extensively on news discourse in the early modern era. He is the author of The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth Century England (2014, second edition) and founder of the CHINED series of conferences on historical news discourse.

Birte Bös is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research interests include synchronic and diachronic pragmatics, discourse analysis and media linguistics. She has investigated the communicative practices of historical and modern news discourse, and she is the co-editor of Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse (2015).

Udo Fries was Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, until his retirement in 2007. He has published widely in the fields of English philology, syntax and text linguistics. In recent years, he has concentrated on work in computer corpus linguistics, producing ZEN (The Zurich English Newspaper Corpus), a corpus of 17th- and 18th-century English newspapers.

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