News as Changing Texts
Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis
Published on 22. February 2012
Book
Hardback
250 pages
978-1-4438-3566-4 (ISBN)
Description
This book focuses on the dialectic interrelation between 'news' and 'change', whereby 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 such typological variety explored across the centuries, largely in the British environment.The time spans in the chapters have been distributed according to (a) historical key moments in the process of news-writing changes, and (b) extant computerized corpora covering such periods, thereby permitting specific linguistic analyses. Indeed, each chapter makes use of a set of corpora specifically devised to suit the needs of scholars studying the periods under scrutiny.The topics discussed and the corpora exploited to analyze them call into question basic methodological issues that are tackled from different perspectives in the book, while the epicentre of all research remains the news itself, in a continuous process of adjustment and renewal.
Reviews / Votes
''It is a particular merit of the present volume that it indeed gives a very good overview of the major extralinguistic developments, of the available data sourcestogether with their respective advantages and problems, of methodological approaches and of relevant research questions. In this respect it is comparable to acomprehensive handbook treatment, also with regard to the ratio of reported vs. new research. [...] There can be no doubt [...] that the volume is a stimulatingread and provides many insights into the evolution of historical news discourse.'' - Claudia Claridge, 'Anglia' 131:1 (2013), 141-145."The volume [...] explores almost four hundred years of newspaper writing. One of the assets of the book is the very chapter organization, which is not based on equally distributed time spans, but rather on relevant turning points in news history and also on the specific academic expertise of the authors. This editorial decision allows for a less pre-packaged and more lively approach to changes in news discourse and format. Another valuable aspect of the book is that, as experts and even compilers of machine-readable corpora, the authors share their personal experience and concerns with readers, such as the need to focus on amounts of news material that can be searched electronically but which can also be read and analyzed manually in their entirety. Moreover, available corpora (such as ZEN, the largest corpus of late 17th- and 18th-century newspapers, compiled by Fries himself et al.) are described, evaluated, and sometimes critiqued as for size and features, thus enabling the academic reader - and, more broadly, the scientific community - to gather useful information and stimuli for further research."- Anna Belladelli, Iperstoria.More details
Edition
Unabridged edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
Unabridged edition
Product notice
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 212 mm
Width: 148 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-4438-3566-4 (9781443835664)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Udo Fries | Nicholas Brownlees | Roberto Facchinetti
News as Changing Texts
Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis (Second Edition)
Book
09/2015
2nd Edition
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
€79.41
Shipment within 15-20 days
Roberta Facchinetti Nicholas Brownlees Birte Boes Udo Fries
News as Changing Texts
Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis
E-Book
12/2011
1st Edition
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
€106.79
Available for download
Persons
Roberta Facchinetti is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Verona, Italy. Her main research fields focus on media linguistics, language description and pragmatics, with special reference to how language is used to negotiate social and discourse roles. This is done mostly by means of computerized corpora of both synchronic and diachronic English. On the subject she has authored, co-authored and edited various books and articles, among which are Corpus Linguistics 25 Years On (2007) and From International to Local English - And Back Again (2010) with David Crystal and Barbara Seidlhofer.Nicholas Brownlees is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Florence, Italy. He has written extensively on early modern news and is the author of The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth-Century England (2011). He is also editor of News Discourse in Early Modern Britain (2006) and co-editor of The Language of Public and Private Communication in a Historical Perspective (2010).Birte Boes is currently Guest Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Augsburg, Germany, and has worked as a Junior Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Rostock. Her research interests include synchronic and diachronic pragmatics, discourse analysis and media linguistics. Based on the Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC), which is currently being extended, she has investigated the communicative practices of historical and modern news discourse.Udo Fries was Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, until his retirement in 2007. He has published widely in the fields of English philology, syntax and text linguistics. In recent years he has concentrated on work in computer corpus linguistics, producing ZEN (The Zurich English Newspaper Corpus), a corpus of 17th- and 18th-century English newspapers.