The Language of Newspapers

1
The Language of Newspapers
2
Cultural and Linguistic Issues

• Roger Fowler, Language in the News. Discourse and
  Ideology in the Press (1991)
• Stuart Allan, News Culture (2004)
• Danuta Reah, The Language of Newspapers (2002)

3
NEWS ACCOUNT

• NOT A TRANSLATION OF THE REALITY OF AN EVENT, BUT
  AN IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION
• NEWS IS A REPRESENTATION OF THE WORLD IN
  LANGUAGE

4
Teun A. Van DijkNews as Discourse (1988)
5
Macrolevel-Microlevel

• Macrostructure
• Thematic organization of the text and its global
  coherence
• Topics
• Hierarchical structure
• Microstrucures
• Propositions
• Words, phrases, clause and sentence forms

6
News Discourse

• HEADLINE
• NEWS LEAD
• NARRATIVE ORDER
• VOCABULARY
• FORM OF ADDRESS
• TRANSITIVITY AND MODALITY

• RELATIONS OF TIME
• RELATIONS OF PLACE
• IMPLIED READER
• CLOSURE

7
GENDER-ETHNICITY

• How women are portrayed in news discourse
• Representation of ethnicity
• Ideological oppositions
• CULTURAL IDENTITY

8
Language in the news

• Typographical Devices
• Register
• Deixis
• Transitivity
• Syntactic Analysis
• Lexical Structure

9
PERSONALIZATION

• Stories about individuals dominate the news
• Elite persons
• Ordinary people
• Groups
• Categories
• DISCRIMINATION IN DISCOURSE

10
HEADLINE

• Its function dictates its shape, content and
  structure
• Minimum number of words
• Attract the reader to the story

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HEADLINES

• Words used SHORT, ATTENTION-GETTING, EFFECTIVE
• AMBIGUITY (homophones, homonyms, polisemes)
• INTERTEXTUALITY
• PHONOLOGY
• Connotations emotional loading

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HEADLINES

• LEXICAL WORDS more useful than GRAMMATICAL WORDS
• NOUN PHRASES
• WORD ORDER
• VISUAL FUNCTION

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HEADLINES

• NAMING DEVICES
• IMPLIED READER (to whom the text is addressed)

14
AUDIENCE

• Created reader
• Language creates a SYSTEM OF SHARED VALUES
• Role of editorials (opinions)

15
Language operates at several levels

• Visual or graphological level
• Phonological level

• Lexical level
• Syntactic level

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Naming strategies

• People
• First (and last) name, nickname
• Profession, formal title
• Groups
• BritishBrits
• AustraliansAussies
• ArgentiniansArgies
• AboriginesAbos

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SYNTAX

• VERBS
• actionals/relationals
• trasactives/non-transactives
• active/passive voice
• modal verbs
• imperatives

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COHERENCE

• Newspaper texts form a coherent whole, carrying
  an ideological stance throughout the article
• LEXICAL COHESION (semantic field, repetition,
  synonyms, antonyms)
• GRAMMATICAL COHESION (pronouns,
  definite/indefinite determiners, conjunctions)

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NARRATIVE

• FACT FICTION
• Narrative Pattern
• Beginning
• Circumstances (time, place, situation)
• Sequence of events
• Point of the story
• End of the sequence

20
Sentences taken in random order from two articles
that appeared in The Sun and The Times on 4 May
1982 (FALKLANDS WAR)
21
THE SUN 4 MAY 1982
22
THE TIMES 4 MAY 1982