Full Description
The history of English news discourse is characterised by intriguing multilevel developments, and the present cannot be separated from them. For example, audience engagement is by no means an invention of the digital age. This collection highlights major topics that range from newspaper genres like sports reports, advertisements and comic strips to a variety of news practices. All contributions view news discourse in a specific historical period or across time and relate language features to their sociohistorical contexts and changing ideologies. The varying needs and expectations of the newspaper producers, writers and readers, and even news agents, are taken into account. The articles use interdisciplinary study methods and move at interfaces between sociolinguistics, journalism, semiotics, literary theory, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and sociology.
Contents
1. Preface; 2. English news discourse from newsbooks to new media (by Ratia, Maura); 3. Part I. Changing or maintaining conventions?; 4. Of hopes and plans: Newsmakers' metadiscourse at the dawn of the newspaper age (by Bos, Birte); 5. Religious lexis and political ideology in English Civil War newsbooks: A corpus-based analysis of Mercurius Aulicus and Mercurius Britanicus (by Cecconi, Elisabetta); 6. Contemporary observations on the attention value and selling power of English print advertisements (1700-1760) (by Brownlees, Nicholas); 7. A modest proposal in The Gentleman's Magazine: A peculiar eighteenth-century advertisement (by Sklar, Howard); 8. Lexical bundles in news discourse 1784-1983 (by Wang, Ying); 9. Part II. Widening audiences; 10. British popular newspaper traditions: From the nineteenth century to the first tabloid (by Conboy, Martin); 11. The Poor Man's Guardian: The linguistic construction of social groups and their relations (by Claridge, Claudia); 12. Diffusing political knowledge in illustrated magazines: A comparison between the Portuguese O Panorama and the British The Penny Magazine in 1837-1844 (by Sousa, Jorge Pedro); 13. From adverts to letters to the editor: External voicing in early sports match announcements (by Chovanec, Jan); 14. The public identity of Jack the Ripper in late nineteenth-century British newspapers (by Nevala, Minna); 15. Part III. New Practices; 16. Chapter 12. Narrative vs. "objective" style: Notes on the style of news (agency) reports on violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (by Stenvall, Maija); 17. Chapter 13. Astride two worlds: Emergence of Italian-American identity in the Massachusetts immigrant press (by Ryan, John M.); 18. Chapter 14. Newspaper funnies at the dawn of modernity: Multimodal humour in early American comic strips (by Ermida, Isabel)
