Author: Ingrid Westin
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004334009
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
This work is a corpus-based study of the language of English up-market (“quality”) newspaper editorials, covering the period 1900–1993. CENE, the Corpus of English Newspaper Editorials, was compiled for the purposes of this study and comprises editorials from the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and The Times chosen to represent periods at ten-year intervals. The language of the editorials was investigated with regard to features that previous research had proved to be markers of such types of discourse as might be of interest to an investigation of the development of the language of newspaper editorials. To begin with, sets of features associated with the empirically defined dimensions of linguistic variation presented in Biber (1988) were compared across decades and newspapers; these dimensions included personal involvement and information density, narrative discourse, argumentative discourse, abstract discourse, and explicit reference. However, since the study showed that the features within each set often developed in diverging directions, the old sets were broken up and new ones formed on the basis of change and continuity as well as of shared linguistic/stylistic functions, specific for newspaper editorials, among the features involved. It then became apparent that, during the 20th century, the language of the editorials developed towards greater information density and lexical specificity and diversity but at the same time towards greater informality, in so far as the use of conversational features increased. The narrative quality of the editorials at the beginning of the century gradually decreased whereas their reporting and argumentative functions remained the same over the years. When the features were compared across the newspapers analyzed, a clear distinction was noticed between The Times and the Guardian. The language of the Guardian was the most informal and the most narrative while that of The Times was the least so. The information density was the highest inThe Times and the lowest in the Guardian. In these respects, the Daily Telegraph took an intermediate position. The editorials of the Guardian were more argumentative than those of both the Daily Telegraph and The Times. As regards lexical specificity and diversity as well as sentence complexity, the Daily Telegraph scored the highest and The Times the lowest while the results obtained for the Guardian were in between the two.
Author: Udo Fries
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443885541
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
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.
Author: Erik Smitterberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108637078
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
Syntactic Change in Late Modern English presents a stability paradox to linguists; despite the many social changes that took place between 1700 and 1900, the language appeared to be structurally stable during this period. This book resolves this paradox by presenting a new, idiolect-centred perspective on language change, and shows how this framework is applicable to change in any language. It then demonstrates how an idiolect-centred framework can be reconciled with corpus-linguistic methodology through four original case studies. These concern colloquialization (the process by which oral features spread to writing) and densification (the process by which meaning is condensed into shorter linguistic units), two types of change that characterize Modern English. The case studies also shed light on the role of genre and gender in language change and contribute to the discussion of how to operationalize frequency in corpus linguistics. This study will be essential reading for researchers in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics.
Author: Geoffrey N. Leech
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521867223
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Based on the systematic analysis of large amounts of computer-readable text, this book shows how the English language has been changing in the recent past, and discusses the linguistic and social factors that are contributing to this process.
Author: Monika Bednarek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135006372X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Now reissued and retypeset, this canonical book explores the role of language and images in newspaper, radio, online and television news. The authors introduce useful frameworks for analysing language, image and the interaction between the two, and illustrate these with authentic news stories from around the English-speaking world, ranging from the Oktoberfest to environmental disasters to the killing of Osama bin Laden. This analysis persuasively illustrates how events are retold in the news and made 'newsworthy' through both language and image. This clearly written and accessible introduction to news discourse is essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers in linguistics, media and journalism studies and semiotics.
Author: Susanne Flach
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027256985
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
This volume presents a snapshot of the current state of the art of research in English corpus linguistics. It contains selected papers from the 40th ICAME conference in 2019 and features contributions from experts in synchronic, diachronic, and contrastive linguistics, as well as in sociolinguistics, phonetics, discourse analysis, and learner language. The volume showcases the particular strengths of research in the ICAME tradition. The papers in this volume offer new insights from the reanalysis of new data types, methodological refinements and advancements of quantitative analysis, and from taking new perspectives on ongoing debates in their respective fields.
Author: Ole Schützler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108603483
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
Corpus linguistics continues to be a vibrant methodology applied across highly diverse fields of research in the language sciences. With the current steep rise in corpus sizes, computational power, statistical literacy and multi-purpose software tools, and inspired by neighbouring disciplines, approaches have diversified to an extent that calls for an intensification of the accompanying critical debate. Bringing together a team of leading experts, this book follows a unique design, comparing advanced methods and approaches current in corpus linguistics, to stimulate reflective evaluation and discussion. Each chapter explores the strengths and weaknesses of different datasets and techniques, presenting a case study and allowing readers to gauge methodological options in practice. Contributions also provide suggestions for further reading, and data and analysis scripts are included in an online appendix. This is an important and timely volume, and will be essential reading for any linguist interested in corpus-linguistic approaches to variation and change.
Author: Claus Gnutzmann
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 3823373412
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
In times of political and economic globalisation proficiency in the English language has developed into a key competence. The supremacy of English has also manifested itself in academic communication; research and teaching across all disciplines are becoming more and more anglophone. Consequently, academia and the English language as a medium of academic discourse are faced with new challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, the spread of English entails the risk of Anglo-American dominance in cultural and scientific realms leading to disadvantages for non-native speakers of English. On the other hand, English as a common lingua franca is able to function as a catalyst for international cooperation in research and teaching. The articles in this bilingual (German/English) anthology focus on discussing the advantages and disadvantages of an increasing anglophony in academia.
Author: Marianne Hundt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107032792
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
Using increasingly sophisticated databases, this volume explores grammatical usage from the Late Modern period in a broad context.
Author: Xinyue Yao
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027248605
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English, with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics, it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences. State-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods are used to track their functional changes over two and a half centuries. The book presents new evidence of grammatical change and offers a compelling, contact-based account of regional variation. It brings together the insights of various fields, including formal semantics, historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and variationist sociolinguistics.
