News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis

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. 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.