This book is among the first to combine a historical view of media texts with a critical look at their textual diversity today. The thirteen chapters cover corpora of early news-papers and pamphlets, present-day news stories and commentaries, TV talk shows and commercials as well as internet presentations. The studies focus on the wide range of text types in 18th century newspapers and the interpersonal strategies of pamphlets; they pursue the development of the persuasive potential of headlines and advertisements right down to the sophisticated postmodernist and multilingual examples of today. Other topics are the definition and structure of news stories and commentaries, the interpersonal and multi-modal aspects of talkshows, and more radically, the questioning of the journalist's role in the age of the internet. Generally the stress is on the attention-getting side of media texts rather than on the manipulative qualities investigated by critical discourse analysis.

This book is among the first to combine a historical view of media texts with a critical look at their textual diversity today. The thirteen chapters cover corpora of early news-papers and pamphlets, present-day news stories and commentaries, TV talk shows and commercials as well as internet presentations. The studies focus on the wide range of text types in 18th century newspapers and the interpersonal strategies of pamphlets; they pursue the development of the persuasive potential of headlines and advertisements right down to the sophisticated postmodernist and multilingual examples of today. Other topics are the definition and structure of news stories and commentaries, the interpersonal and multi-modal aspects of talkshows, and more radically, the questioning of the journalist’s role in the age of the internet. Generally the stress is on the attention-getting side of media texts rather than on the manipulative qualities investigated by critical discourse analysis.

Provides an introduction to analysing media texts. This book with its award winning DVD, helps students learn how to do semiotic, genre and narrative analysis, content and discourse analysis, and engage with debates about the politics of representation.

The Discourse of News Values breaks new ground in news media research in offering the first book-length treatment of the discursive construction of news values through words and images. Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed empirical analysis to introduce their innovative analytical framework: discursive news values analysis (DNVA). DNVA allows researchers to systematically investigate how reported events are "sold" to audiences as "news" (made newsworthy) through the semiotic resources of language and image. With an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach, The Discourse of News Values analyzes authentic news discourse (both language and images) from around the English-speaking world through three new case studies: one that analyzes newsworthiness around the topic of cycling/cyclists; another that analyzes news values in images disseminated by news media organizations via Facebook; and a third that focuses on news values in "most shared" news items. Introducing readers to the possibilities of both DNVA and corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (CAMDA), The Discourse of News Values brings together corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis in a stimulating and unique book for researchers in Linguistics, Semiotics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Media/Journalism Studies.

The history of modern European languages has been largely determined by the range of functions they have acquired, particularly after 1500. This development necessitated a notable expansion of their syntax and lexis, but is most characteristically reflected in the conventionalization of text types. Starting from the German concept of Textsorte as developed from the 1960s onwards, the present account is a first comprehensive attempt at charting the field for the history and present-day situation of the English language. In text types, a designation is linked with a more or less stable form which guides the writer’s production as well as the reader's expectation, permitting one to recognize straightforward uses as well as deliberate misuses. Some two thousand of such designations are here listed with minimal definitions and dates for first occurrences. The discussion then concentrates on selected types, which are seen as especially illustrative for English: book dedications, cooking recipes, advertisements, church hymns, lexical entries, and jokes. Their functions and development over time are treated in correlation with their specific linguistic characteristics and adaptations to different period styles and social changes in the readership. The functional range of text types in traditions outside England and the consequences of the export of English categories are exemplified by the history of Scots/Scottish English and of English in India. The arguments are accompanied by a lavish supply of textual excerpts and more than fifty pages of facsimiles, which are especially relevant for insights derived from typographical features. A full bibliography and indices are provided at the end. The book will prove useful for decisions on the constitution of representative text corpora and stimulate research into a greater number of individual text types as well as contrastive analyses at least among European languages.

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.