Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse

Editorial page

Title page

LCC data

Table of contents

Preface

English news discourse from newsbooks to new media

1. Introduction

2. News discourse and sociocultural developments in a long diachrony

3. Data in studies on historical news discourse

4. Methodologies and interfaces

5. Concluding remarks

References

Changing or maintaining conventions?

Of hopes and plans

1. Introduction

1.1 Historical background

1.2 Data and methodological approach

2. Major characteristics of prefatory metadiscourse

2.1 Position, volume and structure of inaugural comments

2.2 Major themes in inaugural comments

3. Outlining the design of the paper

4. Constructing identities

4.1 Constructing the self

4.2 Constructing the competitors

4.3 Constructing the target readerships

5. Conclusion

References

Religious lexis and political ideology in English Civil War newsbooks

1. Introduction

2. Theoretical framework

3. Mercurius Aulicus ‘and’ Mercurius Britanicus

4. Seventeenth-century religious context

5. Corpus and methodology

6. Analysis

6.1 Religious keywords in ‘Britanicus’

6.1.1 Popery

6.1.2 Popish

6.1.3 Common Prayer

6.2 Other frequent religious words in ‘Aulicus’ and ‘Britanicus’

6.2.1 Protestant Religion

6.2.2 Reformation

6.2.3 Sacred

7. Conclusion

References

Contemporary observations on the attention value and selling power of English print advertisements (1700–1760)

1. Introduction

2. Periodical print advertising (1620–1760)

3. Data

4. Research Framework

5. Attention Value

6. Selling Power

7. Concluding remarks

References

A modest proposal in ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’

1. Introduction

2. Research questions and our approach

3. The Gentleman’s Magazine

4. A peculiar advertisement

4.1 The purported aim and structure of the advertisement

4.2 On Swift’s coattails

4.3 An ironic satire?

5. Conclusions

References

Lexical bundles in news discourse 1784–1983

1. Introduction

2. Material and method

2.1 Material

2.2 Analytical steps

3. Results

3.1 Frequency

3.2 Structures

3.3 Functions

4. Discussion

5. Conclusion

References

Appendix. Four-word bundles identified in the dataset, with their raw frequencies in each sub-corpus (an incomplete list)

Widening audiences

British popular newspaper traditions

1. Introduction

2. Popular experimentation

3. Victorian Sunday newspapers

3.1 Generic patterns

3.2 Melodramatic features

4. Further commercialisation of the British newspaper market

5. The ‘Daily Mirror’: Rise and fall of a newspaper experiment

6. Tabloid re-launch: New paper on the streets

7. Rewarding reader contributions

8. A new style of letters to the newspaper

9. Creating epistolary dialogues

10. Conclusion

References

The Poor Man’s Guardian

1. Introduction

2. Politics, radical journalism, and the ‘Poor Man’s Guardian’

3. Data and methodology

4. Creating groups: Pronouns, address forms and epithets

4.1 “We” and “you”: The paper and its readers

4.2 “They”: Identifying the opponents

5. Persuasive rhetoric

6. Conclusion

References

Diffusing political knowledge in illustrated magazines

1. Introduction

2. Illustrated press in the mid-nineteenth century: The general context and the cases of Portugal and England

3. O Panorama ‘and’ The Penny Magazine: Similarities and differences in the approaches adopted as to political matters

4. Conclusion

References

Internet references

From adverts to letters to the editor

1. Introduction

2. Theoretical background

3. Data

4. Analysis: Forms of announcing

4.1 Match announcements through letters to the editor

4.1.1 Case 1: The earliest football-match announcement

4.1.2 Case 2: Textual correspondences and models

4.1.3 Case 3: Stressing the informational component

4.2 Classified advertising: Adverts with cricket-match announcements

5. Concluding remarks

Sources

References

The public identity of Jack the Ripper in late nineteenth-century British newspapers

1. Introduction

2. Social identity and language use

2.1 Social identity construction

2.2 Evaluative language

3. Crime and criminals in late nineteenth-century British newspapers

4. Murderer most foul: Studying Jack the Ripper

4.1 The Ripper murders in closer view

4.2 Material and method in the current study

5. Reference in the Ripper news

5.1 Mary Ann Nichols

5.2 Annie Chapman

5.3 Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes

5.4 Mary Jane Kelly

6. Concluding the Ripper evaluation

References

New practices

Narrative vs. “objective” style

1. Introduction

2. Material

3. Theoretical background

3.1 The Appraisal Framework

3.1.1 Values of Appreciation and Judgement

3.1.2 Journalists’ stance on emotions vis-à-vis objectivity and factuality: Suggesting a new taxonomy

3.2 Tools from Functional grammar: Transitivity, ergativity and nominalisation

4. Objectivity as a journalistic ideal

5. News narratives on violence in the late nineteenth century

5.1 Early newspaper narratives based on court proceedings and police reports

5.2 The Modocs executed: AP correspondent as an eyewitness

5.3 Discussion

6. The AP story on an “infernal machine”

7. Towards more “modern” writing style: AP narrative and Reuters “objective” telegrams on the Siedlce Pogrom

7.1 Background on the pogrom

7.2 Analysis of AP and Reuters Siedlce reports

7.2.1 AP and the narrative mode: The ideal of “story”

7.2.2 The Reuters’ Siedlce story: Evading responsibility

7.2.3 AP and Reuters: Emotions of fear and scenes of “unspeakable horror”

7.2.4 Judging the soldiers

8. Concluding remarks

References

Astride two worlds

1. Introduction

2. Purpose and background of this study

3. Previous work and theoretical considerations

3.1 Assimilation studies

3.2 Ethnic identity as expressed through language choice

4. Methodology

5. Analysis of Data

5.1 Preliminary remarks and overview

5.2 Format

5.2.1 Decade 1

5.2.2 Decades 2 and 3

5.2.3 Decade 4

5.2.4 Decade 5

5.3 Content

5.3.1 Decade 1

5.3.2 Decade 2

5.3.3 Decade 3

5.3.4 Decade 4

5.3.5 Decade 5

5.4 Language

5.4.1 Language as self-identification of the community

5.4.2 Language used in reference to others

5.4.3 Emergence of English in Italian text

6. Discussion and conclusions

6.1 Format

6.2 Content

6.3 Language

6.4 Evidence for assimilation and the role of the ‘Gazzetta’

Acknowledgments

References

Newspaper funnies at the dawn of modernity

1. Introduction

2. Tracing the origin of comics

3. Legitimizing comics: Popular culture studies

4. Analysing comics: Semiotics, visual rhetoric and linguistics

5. A model for the analysis of comics

6. The Yellow Kid: Applying the model

6.1 Feudal pride in Hogan’s Alley

6.2 Real Enjoyment

6.3 Merry Xmas Morning in Hogan’s Alley

6.4 The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley

6.5 The Yellow Kid Experiments with the Wonderful Hair Tonic

6.6 A Dark Secret; Or How the Yellow Kid Took a Picture

7. Conclusion

References

Index