Full Description
This book analyzes how news discourse was shaped over time by external factors, such as the historical context, news production, technological innovation and current affairs, and as such both conformed to and deviated from generic conventions. Using data from a newspaper corpus, it offers the first empirical study into the development of style in early mass media. In this analysis, media style appears as a dynamic concept which is highly sensitive to innovative approaches towards making news not only informative but also entertaining to read. This cutting-edge survey will be of interest to academics researching corpus linguistics, media discourse and stylistics.
Contents
Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I: Socio-Stylistic Dimensions; 1. Historical Corpus Stylistics and Early News Media; 2. Media Performance and Organization Profiles; 3. Media Variation and Stylistic Change; 4. Performance and Style: A Socio-Stylistic Profile; Part II: Technologically Facilitated Innovation; 5. Visual Foregrounding in Early Eighteenth-Century Headlines; 6. Syntactic Foregrounding in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century News Discourse; Part III: Situational Aspects: News Context and Early Media Change; 7.Macrotextual Foregrounding Strategies in Eighteenth-Century News Discourse; 8. Microtextual Foregrounding Strategies: Comment and News Context; Conclusion; References; Appendices I-III; Index.
