Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2003

Newspapers have recently become attractive objects of interest to linguists, but little research has been done thus far on news discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The present study contributes to filling this gap by reporting results from a corpus-based study of early English-language newspaper headlines. The analysis reveals that the modern segmentation of news into the three elements of headline, lead, and news story cannot be applied to forerunners of modern newspapers. Instead, a classification model is proposed that takes account of the specific properties of the genre. The physical organisation of early newspapers is first considered, so as to be able to identify typographical categories of headings. In a second step, the intended textual functions of headlines are identified, along with typical correlations of headline forms and functions. Applying these categories to an eighteenth-century corpus reveals general tendencies of text structuring in early newspapers.

The use of sentence-initial connectives (and, but) in written discourse historically has been disfavored, including by newspaper copy editors who delete them. This article describes changes in the frequency and use of sentence-initial connectives in news stories over the course of the twentieth century, from their relative absence to a semi-conventionalized frequency of use. Connectives have both referential (or semantic) meaning and functional (or pragmatic) meaning, the latter especially associated with spoken discourse. Using data from one community, I show how connectives in sentence-initial position have come to be used by reporters to meet profession-specific communicative functions that override other prescriptive considerations. These functions are mostly pragmatic, rather than semantic, and include goals that are both interactional (managing the interlocutorial distance between reporter and reader, by invoking spoken discourse norms) and structural (delimiting text categories or genres of journalism, and creating coherence in news narratives).

Most research studies of news assume a bias toward the extreme, the unusual, and the new. However, much of the content of newspapers consists of the routine and the predictable. Using a collection of articles from the New York Times sampled from 1852 to the present, this paper examines news about one subject, national holidays, with a view to explaining the pragmatic functions of such formally unnewsworthy articles. In the national holiday news cycle, the newspaper first announces or forecasts the observances, and after they have taken place the public response is evaluated for enthusiasm and decorum. The standard of behaviour is reinforced through small human interest stories that contain inferential gaps encouraging readers to draw on their knowledge of human conduct. The basic principle being inferred is politeness toward the nation, in the sense of respecting its positive face by anticipating and following its wishes, and respecting its negative face by avoiding challenges and focusing on citizen responsibilities rather than citizen rights. The result is news stories that violate some of the most important “hard” news values previously identified by researchers, by being predictable, ambiguous, static, and generally “good news”. The analysis also shows how news which is apparently free of conflict can prepare readers for future consumption of conflict-oriented news.

This article is concerned with media-induced language change in Austrian German (AG) which is caused by language contact with German German (GG) as presented in television programs broadcast via satellite. A detailed overview of the media situation and its impact on a number of linguistic features of AG is given. It is shown that the impact of this language contact is increasing and that it can be directly linked to the amount of TV-viewing time, especially of children. Examples of this are the emergence of the particle mal and other colloquial lexical items in informal AG, as well as the replacement of traditional items of core AG lexicon with their GG equivalents. Finally, factors which contribute to the ongoing process of language shift are considered: the relative powerlessness of a small language culture in permanent contact with a powerful one, the prestige of new media and their associated language usages which frequently symbolise modernity and worldliness, and lack of linguistic pride, such that the native variety is considered outmoded and provincial.

This paper identifies and analyses current dimensions of change in mass media communication and in particular changes in mass media news transmitted via the Internet. In comparison with traditional media such as newspapers, Internet mass media products rely increasingly on a hypertext structure and on the integration of different channels of communication (hypermedia). In addition, they seek to convey the impression of personal, almost private communication. Audiences are carefully targeted, and media products can be customised to the personal needs and preferences of individual consumers. Online news media are also more interactive, requiring choices by users who activate some links and ignore others, and allowing users to “talk back” to the producers and interact with other users. The life span of information is changing as information is published as news in increasingly shorter time spans. Reception patterns are also changing: television and radio broadcasts available on the Internet can be received in a selective and asynchronous manner, like newspapers. Finally, online media differ from their traditional predecessors in their immediate world-wide availability, and in a reduction in the fixity of their texts.