News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis [2 ed.] 1443880361, 9781443880367, 9781443885546

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface to Second Edition
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix
Index of Titles
General Index

Citation preview

News as Changing Texts

News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis (Second Edition) By

Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös and Udo Fries

News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis (Second Edition) By Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös and Udo Fries This book first published 2012. This edition published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös and Udo Fries All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8036-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8036-7

CONTENTS

List of Figures............................................................................................ vii List of Tables .............................................................................................. ix Preface to Second Edition......................................................................... xiii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Roberta Facchinetti Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620-1665) Nicholas Brownlees Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 49 Newspapers from 1665 to 1765 Udo Fries Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 91 From 1760 to 1960: Diversification and Popularization Birte Bös Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 145 News Writing from the 1960s to the Present Day Roberta Facchinetti Conclusion ............................................................................................... 199 Nicholas Brownlees Bibliography ............................................................................................ 203 Appendix ................................................................................................. 225 Florence Early English Newspapers (FEEN) Corpus Index of Titles.......................................................................................... 227 General Index .......................................................................................... 233

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 4.1................................................................................................. 166 Structure of the Computerised Corpus of English-French Journalese Figure 4.2................................................................................................. 170 Screenshot of text W2C-008:4, coded as a news report in ICE-GB Figure 4.3................................................................................................. 171 Screenshot of text W2C-003:2, coded as a news report in ICE-GB Figure 4.4................................................................................................. 173 Distribution of words per story in the Reuters Corpus

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1 .................................................................................................... 16 FEEN (Florence Early English Newspapers) corpus Table 1.2 .................................................................................................... 17 Dataset taken from Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus Table 1.3 .................................................................................................... 22 First person pronouns (1620-1641) Table 1.4 .................................................................................................... 26 First person pronouns (1620-1654) Table 1.5 .................................................................................................... 31 Second person pronouns (1620-1654) Table 1.6 .................................................................................................... 45 Marginalia in Mercurius Britanicus Table 2.1 .................................................................................................... 56 Number of issues and words of newspapers in the ZEN corpus for the 17th century Table 2.2 .................................................................................................... 61 Number of issues and words of newspapers in the ZEN corpus for the years 1701 to 1721 Table 2.3 .................................................................................................... 64 Number of issues and words of newspapers in the ZEN corpus for the years 1731 to 1761 Table 2.4 .................................................................................................... 68 Percentage of words in the news sections between 1701 and 1761 Table 2.5 .................................................................................................... 70 Percentage of words in shipping news against all news (foreign and home news) Table 2.6 .................................................................................................... 71 Percentage of the text classes ACCIDENT and CRIME between 1731 and 1751 against all news items Table 2.7 .................................................................................................... 77 Percentage of announcements and advertisements between 1671 and 1721 (including LOST AND FOUND) Table 2.8 .................................................................................................... 77 Percentage of announcements and advertisements between 1731 and 1761 (including LOST AND FOUND)

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 .................................................................................................. 111 Newspapers in RNC-1 Table 3.2 .................................................................................................. 115 A summary of characteristics of popular papers Table 3.3 .................................................................................................. 122 Structural organization of the Tay bridge reporting in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (4 January 1880) Table 3.4 .................................................................................................. 127 Features of conversationalization Table 3.5 .................................................................................................. 130 First- and second-person pronouns in RNC-1 Table 3.6 .................................................................................................. 132 First-person singular pronoun I in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper Table 3.7 .................................................................................................. 134 Use of first-person singular pronoun I in RNC-1 Table 3.8 .................................................................................................. 135 Use of first-person plural pronoun we in RNC-1 Table 3.9 .................................................................................................. 137 Targets of second-person pronoun you in RNC-1 Table 3.10 ................................................................................................ 139 Distribution of first- and second-person pronouns in quality and popular candidates in RNC-1 Table 4.1 .................................................................................................. 152 UK daily newspaper circulations 1965, 1985, 2007 Table 4.2 .................................................................................................. 156 The landscape of independent and community journalism Table 4.3 .................................................................................................. 157 The news cycle for breaking stories Table 4.4 .................................................................................................. 158 Increasing criticism of press accuracy, openness Table 4.5 .................................................................................................. 159 Views of press bias, fairness, independence Table 4.6 .................................................................................................. 160 News Organizations criticized for accuracy, bias and news judgement Table 4.7 .................................................................................................. 163 Distribution of the Press samples in the BROWN corpus Table 4.8 .................................................................................................. 165 The BROWN family of corpora Table 4.9 ................................................................................................. 189 No. of blogs, posts and tokens retrieved

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Table 4.10 ................................................................................................ 190 Time adverbials Table 4.11 ................................................................................................ 192 Frequency of 1st and 2nd person pronouns

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

We are very pleased that the positive response to the first edition has given us the opportunity to develop ideas and update bibliographical information and sources for this second edition. Although just three years have passed since the publication of the first edition much has occurred in the meantime. The ever increasing public and scholarly interest in news, both past and present, has led to the compilation and publication online of important archives and corpora. For example, in the field of British historical news one highly significant archive source is the British Newspaper Archive. At the time of publication of the first edition this had just gone online, and contained a mere fraction of the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century newspapers that it presently hosts. Whereas for the seventeenth century, a useful new electronically-readable corpus is the Florence Early English Newspapers (FEEN) corpus. This went online in 2013. Increased interest in historical and contemporary news discourse has also prompted a number of important conferences over the last three years. One series of conferences that has been particularly relevant for our research field are the Conferences on Historical News Discourse (CHINED) of 2012 (Rostock), 2014 (Helsinki) and 2015 (Porto). The CHINED conferences have provided forums for news linguists to present and discuss new corpora, methodology and forms of analysis. These findings, together with many others that have also been published in the last three years, have informed and enriched this second edition of News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis.

The authors, July 2015

INTRODUCTION ROBERTA FACCHINETTI

Newspapers are not a dying breed, although they are metamorphosing under pressures of technological developments and operating in increasingly competitive markets for readers and revenues. Newspapers are experiencing fundamental changes in their formats and contents, their economic organization and finance, the newsgathering and reporting practices of the journalists who deliver the news, as well as the technology employed to produce and distribute them. (Franklin 2008: 30).

The mainstay of this book is the dialectic interrelation between ‘news’ and ‘change’, whereby news is intended as a textual type in its evolutionary—and revolutionary—development, while change will be discussed with reference to the form, content and structure of such typological variety explored across the centuries, largely in the British environment. Bearing in mind that any change often has a hard life, at least in its early stages, and that it often has mistrust as its twin brother, we will also illustrate the problematicity of such change(s) focusing on three main dimensions: corpora, methodology and analysis. Indeed, when, some fifty years ago, the compilers of the first computerized corpora posited that the analysis of language in use would open up a new dimension of linguistic research, a few scholars heard their generativist foundations crack and tried to raise a Chomskyan wall against this linguistic breakthrough, which advocated a shift from the sheer paradigmatic level of linguistic analysis to the syntagmatic one. As a result, a dichotomy between corpus linguists and the so-called ‘armchair linguists’ took shape. Luckily, the two opposing sides have now started to steer the middle course, that is, to merge the positivity of both theoretical and corpus-based research, thus leading to great progress in the field. Similarly, when newspapers took their first steps in the early seventeenth century, a mechanical printing press was the only available tool. Then, technological breakthroughs started to gain ground at a

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Introduction

tremendous pace; the amelioration of the printing press first, the invention of the telegraph afterwards and finally the birth of the Internet were leaps of the mind into new dimensions of news making and publishing, and in the end they have contributed to ensuring global circulation of news in our present highly networked world. However, while the telegraph was greeted with joy by the news making professionals, the Internet was first regarded with suspicion, because it meant an epochal shift into the wired environment with news visualized on screen, to be ‘clicked in’—and out—at the blink of an eye. In the same way as generativists rose up against corpus-linguists, a good part of print journalism reacted against online fans. This tug-of-war is not over yet, but officially the two channels of news production have reached a truce by joining forces and now mainstream print media are even endorsing online citizen journalism. Through the centuries, news itself, as a textual type, has not forded unharmed the rivers of ink; on the contrary, it has continuously adapted to new environments. At its birth, in the seventeenth century, only reports were published; in a matter of years, news stories were delivered with a clear angle mirroring the attitude either of the editor or of the writer (who, at first, were actually the same person); then the attitudinal slant took a life of its own and gave birth to fully-fledged commentaries and features, while news reports consolidated their top-down structure. Meanwhile, the increasing amount of information gathered in newsrooms contributed to re-shaping newspaper sections and texts; and finally, from pictures to photos, from videos to sound, from intra-textual to inter-textual links, the ‘news piece’ gave way to the ‘news package’. All such changes in news forms, structure and content have occurred dialectically through the centuries and are still ongoing; indeed, in the current media-saturated world, the inverted pyramid is now being challenged by more ‘featuresque’ intros and the neutrality of news reporting is being overshadowed by perspective and subjectivity, to the point that even the clear-cut division between reports, features and commentaries is now somehow blurred. The present book attempts to capture all the above-mentioned changes in news discourse in a diachronic perspective. As for the definition of news discourse, we follow Claridge (2010: 589) in regarding it as comprising reportage and discussion of states and events which for contemporaries would be regarded as being of reasonable novelty.

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In the first chapter of the book Nicholas Brownlees focuses on the early steps of news reporting between 1620, when newssheets and pamphlets started to be published at frequent if not totally regular intervals, and 1665, the year marking the founding of The Oxford Gazette, which is widely acknowledged to be England’s first newspaper. In the second chapter, Udo Fries covers the following century (1665-1765), which saw an unprecedented rise in the number of news publications all over the British Isles, while in the third chapter Birte Bös covers two full centuries (1760-1960), when political, economic and social changes, comprising not only demographic and cultural aspects, but also legal and institutional constraints as well as technological innovations, contributed to making the news writing landscape even more complex and diversified. The closing chapter, Chapter 4, by Roberta Facchinetti, focuses on the latest fifty years of news reporting, starting from the 1960s, a decade that most marked technological enterprise in the 20th century, up until the present time, that sees the monovocality of mainstream news reporting challenged by the multivocality of social networks. The uneven distribution of the time spans in the four chapters has been decided on account of the following two concomitant factors: (a) historical key moments in the process of news writing changes, particularly with reference to Chapters 1 and 4; (b) extant computerized corpora covering such periods, thereby permitting specific linguistic analyses, particularly for Chapters 1, 2 and 3, respectively focusing on the Florence Early English Newspapers Corpus, the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus, and the Rostock Newspaper Corpus. Indeed, to investigate the structural and linguistic peculiarities of news reporting through the centuries, in each chapter we make use of a set of corpora specifically devised to suit the needs of scholars studying the periods under scrutiny. In Chapter 1, the focus is particularly on the representation—in early periodical news—of (a) authorial presence and identity, mostly the function of personal pronouns and of (b) heads and marginalia. The analysis of Chapter 2 is dedicated to the diversification of textual types also with reference to lexical and stylistic comparisons, use of foreign words and phrases, headlines and text beginnings, speech and thought presentation and also graphemics. Chapter 3 discusses the development of popular journalism, between New Journalism and Tabloidization, and illustrates attempts to (a) classify newspapers on a popular/quality-scale and (b) analyze linguistic aspects leading to the ‘conversationalization’ process, mostly first and second person pronouns, the use of the imperative and of quotations. Finally, in Chapter 4, attention is given to the mutable/mutating linguistic specificities of news reporting

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Introduction

largely on account of (a) the influence of the language of social networks and unmediated journalism, (b) the new structure of news packages and (c) the increasing swing between ‘impartiality’ and ‘perspective’ in the news output. The topics discussed and the corpora exploited to analyze them call into question basic methodological issues that are tackled from different perspectives in each chapter. On the one hand, corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) lead us to inductively investigate and test any research question against original data. On the other hand, we are also aware that corpus design poses different problems depending on the research aims and on the interpretation of results. Hence, we are particularly keen on the fact that whatever corpus is exploited, both quantitative and qualitative analyses have to be taken into account, quantitative data being the starting point for further qualitative analysis and, in turn, qualitative analysis being the spur for further quantitative investigation. The epicentre of such a never-ending circle in research is the news itself, while researchers profit from cooperation among themselves. This has certainly been the case with the coauthors of this book. Although we have each investigated areas within our own specific expertise, we have undoubtedly profited from continuous discussion regarding the book’s thematic organization and development. We trust that as we benefitted professionally from the writing of the study so too will students, scholars and professionals, working in historical news, media studies and journalism, be enriched by its reading.

CHAPTER ONE THE BEGINNINGS OF PERIODICAL NEWS (1620-1665) NICHOLAS BROWNLEES

1. History of periodical news (1620-1665) My intention in this chapter is to examine specific linguistic and structural features of early English periodical news. In particular, I shall consider, first, the representation of authorial presence and identity and, secondly, the role of heads and marginalia in the presentation of periodical news. Both these research questions are analyzed with the aid of two computerized news corpora that will be described in Section 2 of the present Chapter. As regards the time span covered in this analysis, I will be focusing on the period between 1620-1665. In these years both the initial and final date are crucial in the history of the English press, since, whilst the former represents the moment when news publishers set about publishing first newssheets and then pamphlets at frequent if not totally regular intervals, the latter year marks the founding of The Oxford Gazette, the twice weekly publication that in format, content and periodicity can be considered England’s first newspaper. A study of these first four decades of English periodical news is as fascinating as the momentous times that were being reported in the various newssheets and weekly pamphlets themselves. What we see is a news discourse grappling with the one fundamental question lying at the heart of all news communication: how should news be presented? What linguistic, interpersonal and graphic features should be adopted to convince the reader to buy the news publication from one week to the next? In its novelty this question was as taxing for contemporary news writers and publishers then as is the role of the internet in news publication nowadays. Whilst in these first years of the twenty-first century news

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professionals have to determine how far traditional practices of news transmission and presentation are valid in the era of the internet, in the first decades of the periodical press news writers had to decide how much of previous forms of news transmission could be successfully exploited in the reporting of periodical news. Prior to 1620, news had been published in the form of occasional news pamphlets, but these publications made no claim to periodicity and generally just focused on one or two relatively recent news events. Was the news idiom found in these occasional news pamphlets—that often spoke of natural disaster, crime and bloody murder, miracles and extraordinary events, pageantry and political spectacle, and more often than not within a highly moralistic framework1—inherently suitable for news publications that determined to come out more or less regularly, providing each time they did so an update on contemporary events and affairs? We shall see that there was no fixed answer. For the first forty-five years of its existence, that is, between 1620-1665, English periodical news presented various different discourses and styles in its attempt to find and keep an audience who would pay one or two pennies a time for the latest news of the day. The earliest extant periodical news publication was published on 2 December 1620. Although its first words were undramatic in the extreme— “The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com”—the news publication containing this news is very significant.2 For posterity it is the first of hundreds of publications that are most frequently referred to as ‘corantos’.3 For the first year of their existence English corantos were first printed in Amsterdam and other towns in Holland and then shipped across the English Channel, after which they were sold at various booksellers and

1

See, for example, Newes from France. Or a relation of a maruellous and fearfull accident of a disaster (1618), Newes from Spain. A true relation of the lamentable accidents (1618), A true relation of a most desperate murder (1617), A wonder woorth the reading, or a true and faithfull relation of a woman (1617), A true relation, of the happy peace concluded by the two mighty princes, Christian the Fourth, King of Denmarke, and Norway (1613), A true relation of Go[ds] wonderfull mercies (1605). The language of occasional news pamphlets between 1600-1620 is examined in Brownlees (2014a: 1-24). 2 Since this newssheet contains no title, it is catalogued under these opening words. See Dahl (1953) for a bibliography of almost all extant corantos between 16201642. 3 They were variously referred to by contemporaries as ‘coranto’, ‘curranto’, ‘corante’, ‘corant’, or ‘courant’.

The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620-1665)

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stationers in the St Paul’s area of London.4 These early corantos were more or less literal translations of previously published Dutch newssheets. As such, most of the news was focused on the early stages of the Thirty Years War fanning out across continental Europe. Each of the corantos consisted of one small folio sheet, with news closely printed in two columns on both front and back page, the various news items being separated by datelines. Out of Weenen, the 6 November. The French Ambassadour hath caused the Earle of Dampier to be buried stately at Presburg. In the meane while hath Bethlem Gabor cited all the Hungerish States, to com together at Presburg the 5. of this present, to discourse aboute the Crowning & other causes concerning the same Kingdom. The Hungarians continue with roveing against these Lands. In like manner those of Moravia, which are fallen uppon the Cosackes yester night by Hosleyn, set them on fire, and slaine many dead, the rest will revenge the same. […] Out of Prage, the 5 of November. Three dayes agone are passed by, 2. mile from this Cittie 6000. Hungarians (chosen out Soldiers) under the General Rediserens, which are gon to our Head-camp, & the Enimie lieth yet near unto ours by Rackonits, though the crie goeth, that the enimie caused all his might to com togither, to com this wayes against Prage, if that comes to passe, it shall not run of without blowes, the which might be revealed with in few dayes. (The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com, 2 December 1620)

The style of these news dispatches is that of factual, unadorned, news reportage. It is hard news with the focus on who, where, what and when. Little importance is given to why something happened since the various writers of the dispatches did not regard it as their duty to interpret events. They were the purveyors of news; comment and analysis were generally left to the reader. These first corantos must have been successful because by the summer of 1621 London publishers had decided to print and sell translated Dutch and German newssheets themselves. The seven extant London-published corantos of the summer and early autumn of 1621 were published by “N.B.”, initials that must have stood for Nathaniel Butter or Nicholas

4

See, however, Hanson (1937-1938) and Boys (2011: 69-70) who doubt the authenticity of many of these Dutch imprints. In their opinion most of these corantos were printed in London.

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Bourne, two names that were to remain associated with the world of periodical news publications over the next twenty years. In 1622 the manner of recounting periodical news changed. Whilst in the first two years periodical newssheets had principally consisted of a succession of unrelated news dispatches from diverse parts of Europe, in 1622 we see the editor intervening in an attempt to provide a more coherent account of the latest news. One of the first occasions we see evidence of this is in June 1622. In the passage below the editor explains a new approach to the writing up of news. Wee write a continuation, that you may see by the proceedings, that there is good dependancy betweene the relations, wherein we purpose to keepe nere to the Lawes of Historie, to guesse at the reasons of the actions by the most apparant presumptions […] (A continuation of more newes from the Palatinate, 13 June 1622)

The editor cum news writer (for they were generally the same person) is proposing to guide the reader from one publication to another through the news stories of the day. In so doing, the editor frequently intersperses his factual recount of the news with more general comment upon what the news signifies in a wider framework of human action and behaviour:5 The whole countrey thereabouts, with the Bishopricke of Spyres, was left to the deuotion of the King of Bohemiah, now by this victory of Hagenaw, made sole master of the field; whereupon the Mansfeldians made what rauage they pleased in that delicate and most fruitfull countrey: And the Count van Hannow of the lower Alsatia (neighbor to Leopoldus) taking into due consideration, that rule of warre; When two powerfull Princes are either declared or engaged in a warre, it hath beene still obserued to be a dangerous thing, for any third man to stand as a neutrall, who is not able against either of them to stand of himselfe: For still the Victor when he hath ouerthrowne the enemies, falls next vpon the weaker Neuters: So that if the Victor has leisure afterward to prosecute them, it is as safe almost, for to haue beene a dependant on the vanquished, as to haue beene onely a looker on (A continuation of more newes from the Palatinate, 13 June 1622)

5

As the world of early seventeenth-century English news writing was peopled by the male sex, my use of the third-person male pronoun extends generically to news writers as a whole at that time.

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Quite often, we find the editor using domesticating strategies designed to facilitate the understanding of far off events in remote European locations. Two such strategies involve the use of metaphor and proverb. To begin at the head, whence the beginnings of all motion, influence, and direction to the whole body, and the severall parts and organs proceed; We thinke it manners first to relate the businesse of the Emperiall Maiesty, vpon whose deliberations & resolutions, the actions of those parts of the world haue their dependancy (A relation of the last newes from severall parts of the world, 8 April 1623) These sixteene are to be executed as they can be taken. And if the Prouerbe (as I thinke) tooke his beginning from this custome, That hee that hath lost his good name is halfe hanged; then are these Gentlemen whose names are thus ignominiously fixt vpon the gibbets, sure to suffer for it (A relation of the weekely occurrences, 22 October 1622)

As this popularizing narration of news is evidence of editorial intervention, it is no wonder that the editor concerned was well known to the news reading public of the time. His name was Thomas Gainsford, and between the summer of 1622 and his death from the plague in the late summer of 1624 he frequently wrote up the news of the time in a highly personal voice. After his death, the news idiom once again reverted to the dry, matterof-fact dispatch style of foreign newssheets as once again the two main coranto publishers, Nicholas Bourne and Nathaniel Butter, relied heavily on the simple translation of foreign news reports for their own English publications. Whether this decision was determined by financial considerations, or by a belief that this impersonal news style was preferred by the reading public, or by the realization that such unmediated news was least likely to offend the ever watchful government authorities of the day, is uncertain, but whatever the case most periodical news was characterized by an impersonal, heavily factual mode of narration up until the end of 1641.6 What led to the change in news discourse was the fast moving political situation overtaking British political life in the first years of the 1640s. Central rule and governance broke down as the king, Charles I (16251649), found himself unable to impose his authority upon a parliament ever more determined to question the inherent legitimacy of royal prerogative. In this battle of wills, and later arms, one of the first features 6

See Brownlees (2014a: 25-96; 2015) for an analysis of discourse features in corantos between 1620-1641.

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of royal power to disappear was that of censorship. In 1641 the various forms of censorship exercised by Star Chamber, the crown’s much feared and hated court of law, were abrogated as Star Chamber itself was abolished.7 The result was that for the first time English periodical news publications were no longer limited to the publication of foreign news unconnected to British affairs.8 However, not only did English news pamphlets, or ‘newsbooks’ as historians frequently refer to these periodical publications between 1641-1665, start publishing national news but by 1643 they also began adopting a very different kind of news discourse from what had been adopted in the first decades of periodical news.9 This new mode of news language is seen in the following passage, taken from Mercurius Aulicus, a newsbook that began publication in January 1643. This evening by an expresse we received advertisement that the Rebels Army approached Banbury, and gave an Alarum to the Towne; whereupon the Earle of Northamptons two noble Brothers and Lieutenant Colonel Greene (who command the Castle and Garrison in the Earles absence) hosted 80 men, who went out as farre as Adderbury, where the worthy Lord Gray was enquartered, and there seized upon 18 of the Rebels Souldiers, which they brought into the Garrison at Banbury, to learne better obedience. All other Newes (I mean Lyes) you must expect from a fine new thing, borne this weeke, called Mercurius Britannicus, for Mercuries (like Committees) will beget one another. But sure he is no true Brittaine, for the first thing he said, is, that most of the Welchmen for piety and godlinesse are as ignorant as Heathens (the man begins handsomely. (2. He sayes, that the Irish Rebels doe daily land in Wales, and are there made welcome: (They’le doe as much for you, if you’le goe thither.) 3. That the Earle of Ormond by his delayes hath put many thousand Protestants to sword, (and yet you say the Rebels hate him as their most active enemy.) (Mercurius Aulicus, 27 August-2 September 1643)

What we see in this passage are two distinct types of news discourse. The first kind is found in the first paragraph, where the news writer is reporting recent events in the Civil War that had broken out between the 7

See McElligott (2005) for how censorship affected the publication of news in early modern England. 8 The only corantos to provide detailed news affecting English interests abroad were published in the summer of 1627 at the time of the duke of Buckingham’s illjudged invasion of France. See, for example, The continuation of our weekely newes (1 August 1627). 9 For monographs containing extensive discussion on 1640s and 1650s newsbooks, see Frank (1961), Raymond (1996; 2003) and Peacey (2004).

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king and parliament in August 1642. Although the news content is domestic, and hence in contrast to the foreign news dispatches making up coranto news in the first two decades of periodical news, the style of narration is not so dissimilar from the earlier mode of news narration. Subjective involvement in the text is limited to the exclusive personal pronoun “we” in line 1, no attempt being made to construct an interpersonal relationship with the reader. In contrast, in the second paragraph, not only do we see the invective and polemic that came to typify much Civil War and Interregnum news discourse but also both subjective (I, you) and intersubjective (he) personal pronouns where I refers to the news writer, you to both the reader (“you must expect from a fine new thing”) and the cited newsbook (“and yet you say the Rebels hate him”) and he to the personalized adversarial newsbook Mercurius Britanicus).10 These different markers of authorial involvement and intertextual communication characterize a discourse strategy that became the hallmark of many news texts during the Civil War years. Called ad locum animadversion in classical rhetoric,11 and ‘disclaiming through engagement’ by Martin and White (2005: 118-121), the discourse strategy involves the refutation of a previously produced work by means of first citation and then rebuttal of the prior text. This form of dialogic confrontation was a common feature of the ‘Pamphlet Wars’ or ‘War of Words’ that took place in the 1640s, as news writers of diverse political and religious leanings exploited this unique moment in seventeenth-century English history, when censorship was for practical purposes non-existent, to question, criticize and frequently deride other periodical news texts crowding the London booksellers’ shelves. The heady explosion of press freedom came to a halt in the autumn of 1649. It was then that Oliver Cromwell, by now de facto leader of the victorious parliamentarians (Charles I having been executed in January 1649) passed a law that drastically reined in the number of periodical news publications. While initially the only newsbooks to survive for any length of time were government approved, by October 1655 the newsbooks were not just authorized but directly written on behalf of the government. The man who was granted sole permission to print periodical news for the Protectorate, as the English government was then known, was Marchamont 10

Although spelt ‘Mercurius Britannicus’ in the cited passage from Mercurius Aulicus, the true title of the parliamentarian newsbook was Mercurius Britanicus, hence, without the second ‘n’ as is the case in the correct Latin spelling. Mercurius Britanicus was misspelt in the first number, and as such the title remained. 11 See Raymond (2003: 211) for a typology of the various forms of animadversion frequently employed in Civil War pamphlet polemic.

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Nedham, a colourful character and highly gifted polemicist and editorialist. Formerly editor of the highly politicized 1640s newsbooks Mercurius Britanicus and Mercurius Pragmaticus, he also displayed the more traditional virtues of good journalistic attention to detail and accuracy in his 1650s newsbooks Mercurius Politicus and The Publick Intelligencer. Making good use of the information regularly supplied to him by his excellent contacts at home, and his creation of a highly efficient network of correspondents abroad, he generally provided good quality news.12 Regarding the content of home news, what distinguishes the 1650s from previous decades is an increased use of advertisements and a greater focus on crime and court proceedings.13 The first two passages below typify the ever-growing book and medical advertisements found in periodical publications at that time whilst the third passage is an example of a crime report.

)The Good Old Way; or Perkins Improved: In a Plain Exposition and sound Application of those depths of Divinity briefly comprised in his six Principles: by that late painful and faithful Minister of the Gospel, Charls Broxolm, in Derbyshire. To be sold by John Rothwell at the Fountain and Bear in Cheapside; and by Joseph Barber at the Lamb in Pauls Churchyard. (Mercurius Politicus, 3-10 November 1653) People that are Melancholy or Distracted, are kept and preserved from danger in a very convenient place for that purpose, being in an excellent Air highly commended, likewise for those that are in Consumption. Such whose Cure is intended, may have the advice of Physitians usually frequenting the House. They that have occasion may inquire farther of Mistress Jackson in Drury-Lane, near the Fortune Tavern over against Long Aker, or of Mr. Field an apothecary near the Gatehouse of Westminster. (Mercurius Politicus, 16-23 October 1656) The said Jane being walking in Greenwich Park, with Mrs. Smith her Kinswoman, and two maids attending her, the said Master Welsh, Robert Thompson, and others, armed with Swords, Pistols, and other weapons, in pursuance of that design did enter the said Park, and being all strangers to 12

See Frank (1980) for a critical biography of Marchamont Nedham. The earliest advertisement in a coranto appears on 16 September 1624 (Dahl 1953: 125). For advertising in newsbooks, see Frank (1961: 201-202, 256-257 and passim) and Sommerville (1996: 54-55). See Chapter 2 of the present volume for analysis of the role of advertising in periodical news publications between 16651765. 13

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13

the said Jane, violently seized upon her; and forcibly set her on horseback, one also violently threw Mistris Smith upon the ground, set his knee upon her breast and kept her down, while the others laid hold of her two maid servants, and withheld them from helping of her. [...] The Charge being read, the Court ordered that the said Mr. Welch, should personally appear on Saturday come sevennight being the 15 of this instant March at Sergeants Inne aforesaid, at 9 of the clock in the forenoon, to make his defence to the said Charge and pretended marriage by him, and have likewise ordered summons to be sent forth against Mrs. Horwood, Mrs. Basset, and others, to appear at the same time. (A Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence, 5-12 March 1651)

When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, it was no surprise that Marchamont Nedham was not around to report the popular celebrations. He had escaped to Holland, and in his place the royalist Henry Muddiman had been installed as official publisher of periodical news. However, whilst Muddiman and following him Roger L’Estrange now took over what had been previously carried out by Nedham, what did not change was the essential news product that was being produced. It was still a newsbook consisting of between 8 and 16 quarto pages. It was only in November 1665, with the first number of the Oxford Gazette, that the format changed, thereby heralding the end of periodical pamphlet news.

2. Corpora The two machine-readable corpora I shall examine for this period are the Florence Early English Newspapers (FEEN) Corpus and the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus. The FEEN corpus covers the period from December 1620 until April 1653 whilst the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus spans the period from the middle of December 1653 until the end of May 1654. At present I am unaware of any electronic corpora for the period from 16541665, the second year being when the Oxford Gazette began publication. However, whilst it would be statistically useful to have further electronically readable texts for this period, it is unlikely that their examination would offer any important new insights which cannot already be gleaned from the 1650 corpora available. The next major change in English news production and language occurred with the introduction of the Oxford Gazette in 1665 (renamed The London Gazette in 1666), and this publication is included in the Zurich English Newspapers Corpus, which is examined in Chapter 2 of this present volume. The FEEN corpus, co-compiled by Nicholas Brownlees and Francesca Benucci, is divided into six subcorpora designed to represent particular

14

Chapter One

aspects of periodical news publication between 1620-1653. The texts were, therefore, not selected at randon (as is sometimes quite justifiably the procedure with some corpora compilation) but were rather the result of an informed acquaintanceship with early English news texts in general. The first group of texts consists of the corantos published between December 1620 and October 1621. These are more or less literal translations of Dutch or German newssheets previously published in continental Europe. The second subcorpus is made up of corantos published between the summers of 1622 and 1624. As has been stated above, these two years were especially significant in the early history of English periodical news discourse. It was then that a marked effort was made to forge a new discourse style, a model of news presentation that was very different from the generally laconic news dispatches that were found in Europe and which had made up the first English corantos. The final group of corantos includes news publications published between 1625 and 1641. Bearing in mind that between October 1632 and the end of 1638 corantos were banned in England, this means in practice that the corantos range from 1625-1632 and 1639-1641. The fourth and fifth subcorpora consist of 1640s newsbooks. The smaller of these subcorpora include several well-known newsbooks of the decade: Mercurius Civicus, Mercurius Pragmaticus, The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, The Moderate and The Moderate Intelligencer. The larger 1640s subcorpus is, instead, made up of 22 numbers of Mercurius Aulicus and 16 numbers of Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Britanicus. Mercurius Aulicus (henceforth Aulicus) was the preeminent royalist newsbook, the “Aulicus” in the title referring to the court of the English monarch, Charles I. Published in Oxford, though there were also occasional London reprints, like other newsbook series it came out once a week. In contrast to Aulicus, the London-published Mercurius Britanicus was parliamentarian in outlook. It was founded in August 1643, eight months after Aulicus, to counter the latter’s highly effective propaganda. Indeed, the presence of “Britanicus” in the title of the parliamentarian newsbook underlines its intention to report and defend the news and rights of the nation at large. The decision to focus on Aulicus and Mercurius Britanicus (henceforth Britanicus) in this subcorpus was not just motivated by the relative importance of the two news pamphlets but also by the extent to which the two news publications directly interact with each other. Ten of the Aulicus numbers in the FEEN corpus have specific sections devoted to attacking the news of parliamentarian pamphlets, and in particular the news published by Britanicus. This same structure is reflected in Britanicus, which is also often divided into two parts, with the first section

The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620-1665)

15

consisting of an account of the week’s news and the second a commentary of the enemy’s news. The latter section is entitled “Aulicus” since Nedham exclusively attacks the Oxford pamphlet. This subcorpus, therefore, provides a useful sample of Martin and White’s abovementioned ‘disclaiming through engagement’ strategy. The final subcorpus of FEEN consists of three titles, and seven publications, published between 1650-1653. The newsbooks comprising the subcorpus are Mercurius Politicus, The Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings and A Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence. In these years the first two titles were the most important but A Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence is also included in the corpus since it is described as “extremely typical” of the times (Frank 1961: 241). In conclusion, the dataset in the FEEN corpus were not selected at random (as is sometimes quite justifiably the procedure with some corpora compilation) but were rather the result of an informed acquaintanceship with early English news texts in general. In the FEEN corpus the original corantos and newsbooks are found at the British Library in the Burney Collection of Newspapers and Thomason Tracts. The corpus texts had to be keyed in manually because the quality of the original images was too low to permit satisfactory OCR scanning. Regarding manual digitization, Baker (2006: 35) correctly writes that it is “the final, and usually last resort of the corpus builder”, since it is either extremely labour intensive or costly (should you pay someone to do it professionally). However, if the keying in is carried out by the compiler it does at least give him or her the chance to become not just acquainted with the text but also aware of the kinds of research questions that could prove worthy of investigation.14 Excepting those cases where the original text is unclear, all the single news texts in FEEN are complete copies of the original publications. The compilers decided to focus on a limited range of complete numbers rather than a much greater range of samples of individual publications on the grounds that at various times between 16201641, and increasingly in the 1640s, news texts became increasingly heterogeneous in content and style (Raymond 2003: 214). In the original version of the corpus, that formed the basis of the research in this chapter, the subcorpus which had the most developed electronic formatting was that containing the Aulicus and Britanicus publications. This was marked up in XML (Extensible Markup Language), a markup language based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language 14

The advantage of knowing one’s corpus is underlined by Partington (2003: 12) who ensured that his corpus of downloaded White House press briefings was not so large that he could not read it in full.

Chapter One

16

(SGML) which is adopted for encoding electronic texts. Each XML file included in the Aulicus/Britanicus subcorpus had a corresponding DTD (Document Type Definition) file defining its markup characteristics. These included the title, week number, date line, page number, and, in the case of Britanicus, the margin captions that are frequently found. This version was used privately, but since 2013 FEEN can be accessed at https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk. The main difference between the original version of FEEN and that on the University of Lancaster website is that the latter only includes texts up until 1649. The Lancaster University version can be analysed with the corpus analysis tool, Corpus Query Processor (CQPweb).15 Period 1620-1621

1622-1624 1625-1641

1642-1649

1643-1644

1650-1653 Total

Contents Corantos translated from Dutch/German newssheets Corantos with much editorial input Corantos generally based on foreign dispatches or translations 7 separate titles apart from Aulicus and Britanicus Aulicus and Britanicus newsbooks 3 separate titles

No. of publications 4

Word count for period 8,000

5

21,500

9

28,300

12

40,000

38

148,400

7 75

32,600 278,800

Table 1.1: FEEN (Florence Early English Newspapers) corpus. Figures in Table 1.1 and Table 1.2 are rounded up to hundreds. See Appendix for titles of publications in FEEN. The Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus, which can be accessed at https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/lnc1654, is very different in size and focus

15

For a description of CQPweb, see Hardie (2012).

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from the FEEN corpus.16 First of all, it is significantly larger in that it amounts to one million words. Secondly, rather than including selected texts over an extended period of time it includes a continuous series of news publications over a short period of time. Thus, it not only comprises the full run of the satirical newsbook Mercurius Fumigosus (1654-1655), but the complete collection of every mainstream newsbook published in London between the middle of December 1653 and the end of May 1654. This latter part of the corpus amounts in all to 870,000 words and consists of 23 different titles (Prentice and Hardie 2009: 31). However, since the full corpus was considered unnecessary for the purposes of my research questions in this present study, I limited my examination of the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus (henceforth called LNC) to three newsbooks. They are respectively Mercurius Politicus, The Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings and A Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence—the same three newsbooks already found in the 1650s subcorpus of FEEN. The word count for these newsbooks that I have selected from LNC, coupled with the 1650s newsbooks in FEEN, is approximately the same as that for the 1640s FEEN newsbook corpus. Period

Contents

1653-1654

Mercurius Politicus (newsbook) A Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence (newsbook)

1653-1654

1653-1654

The Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings

No. of publications 23

Word count for period 118,700

12

31,200

3

16,500

38

166,400

(newsbook) Total word count

Table 1.2: Dataset taken from Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus.

16

The data encoding system employed in LNC is explained on the web site. A comprehensive list of online news archives and corpora (including links) is provided at the end of this volume.

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Chapter One

Concluding the description of the corpora accessed in the present study, we see that the total word count of FEEN combined with the dataset selected from LNC therefore comes to 445,200. This figure comprises 199,000 words of 1650s newsbooks, 188,400 of 1640s newsbooks, and 57,800 words of corantos between 1620-1641. The 1650s and 1640s word counts are not insubstantial and certainly give the researcher the possibility of identifying linguistic features and semantic collocations in some of the main news publications of the period. The corantos’ word count is clearly much smaller but one needs to remember that not only were there no such publications between the autumn of 1632 and December 1638 but many fewer corantos were published than newsbooks. Of the 404 corantos recorded in Dahl’s coranto bibliography (1953), no more than 350 are extant, which means that although small in number the corantos in FEEN still amount to more than 5% of the total extant output. Furthermore, the representativeness of the FEEN corantos is enhanced by the subdivision of the texts into three subcorpora. Through these subcorpora we have the opportunity of recognizing specific discourse styles particular to certain periods over the two decades.

3. Authorial presence and personal identity in early English news corpora 3.1. Methodology In this section I wish to examine the question of identity in the first periodical news. In particular, I intend to focus on the extent to which the news writers’ identity and interpersonal interaction with both the reader and third parties is revealed by the presence of personal pronouns.17 Although not frequently addressed, the notion of authorial presence, and the degree to which he, the seventeenth-century news writer, should reveal himself in the presentation of news is sometimes either alluded to or directly brought to the fore by news writers of the time. For example, Thomas Gainsford is undoubtedly referring to this crucial aspect of news reporting in the following passage from a coranto of 4 October 1622: I begin with Naples, because as neere as I can I will come orderly forward with the Prouinces as they lye, and in regard the seuerall Letters beare not one date, I haue thought good to Muster the Newes, which belongs to the

17

See also Chapters 3 (3.4) and 4 (6.3.2.) of the present volume for further discussion of personal pronouns in historical and modern-day news discourse.

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same place, as it were into one Armie, and so you shall receiue the occurrences alltogether [...] There are so many Letters from the seuerall parts of the LowCountries, and so much contradiction, as men on either side fauour the cause, that I know not how to satisfie the Reader: yet considering there is but one truth, and to be honest in a plaine enarration (sic) of the same, is allowable, therefore as neere as I can, I will relate, what is most probable and worthy of your acceptation (A true relation of the affaires of Europe)

Therefore, Gainsford is rejecting the news publishing practice of simply letting the disparate, multi-authored dispatches themselves tell the story. To use the terminology of Iedema, Feez and White (1994) in their study of media discourse, Gainsford is setting himself up as Commentator rather than Reporter. Whereas a Reporter’s voice is constructed as being “impersonal, anonymous and unevaluating [...] the personalized voice of the Commentator offers explicit ‘subjectivity’” (1994: 235). It is the voice of the “individual who presents her/himself as able to put aside the strictly ‘factual’ and to rely essentially on their own value judgements, intuitions and ideological perspective. Her/his voice is typically individualized so that s/he speaks directly to her/his audience in her/his voice” (1994: 235).18 It is this personal voice, reflected in the constant use of I, that stands out in Gainsford’s address to his readers. However, it should also be remembered that whilst the use of first person personal pronouns provides explicit evidence of authorial presence, the absence of such pronouns does not a priori exclude these features. The idea that news dispatches lacking personal pronouns present “faceless stance”—to use Biber’s and Finnegan’s expression (1989a: 108)—is inaccurate since even in the most apparently objective dispatch some form of subjectivity has been exercised.19 Even the most factual report will be the product of numerous value judgements including, for example, what 18

See also Stubbs (1996: 17) who distinguishes between institutionalised and noninstitutionalized language where the former is “factual, literal, objective, authoritative and independent of the author, rather than appearing to be expressed from a particular viewpoint”. 19 Bednarek (2006: 203) makes the same comment regarding modern day hard news. However, the impossibility of a totally objective representation of reality is also recognized in other discourses apart from journalism. For example, in her study of identity and place, Del Lungo Camiciotti (2009: 131) says that these realities “are always seen from a specific point of view. They are negotiated through experience and this, in turn, is negotiated by the discursive conventions of the community.”

20

Chapter One

facts to report, how much prominence to give to each single event, whether or not agents should be indicated in the recounting of the event. Therefore, in line with Iedema, Feez and White (1994: 203), we can say that whilst it is meaningful to speak of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reporting we must remember that rather than absolutes such journalistic styles instead represent “a difference in the degree of our commitment to the truth value of what we are saying”. In my examination of the news writers’ use of personal pronouns in the FEEN and Lancaster corpora, I shall base my methodological framework on recent media discourse studies relating to authorial voice generally and the function of personal pronouns in particular. Especially relevant are the works of Iedema, Feez and White (1994: 200-235), Claridge (2000), Westin (2002: 19-63), Bednarek (2006), Levorato (2009), and Ferrarotti (2009). These works draw to a lesser or greater extent on work on professional identity carried out in other genres, one of which has been the study of academic discourse. In this field the work of Hyland (2002, 2005) has been especially significant. Hyland’s examination of academic texts, and the ways in which writers of such texts seek through ‘engagement’ to both interact with their readership and create their own professional identity, has also motivated the study of interpersonal linguistic features in university lectures. In this area of research Crawford Camiciottoli (2005) and Fortanet (2004) consider how we and you are used in the lecturer’s discourse to engage and facilitate the audience’s understanding of the contents of the lecture.20 In my analysis I shall examine the first-person personal pronouns I and we/wee,21 and the second-person personal pronouns you, thou and thee. Thou and thee are included because in the first half of the seventeenth century the T/V distinction was still significant in communicative interaction, with subject thou and object thee adopted in familiar, intimate contexts or conversely as a sign of disrespect or contempt.22 This dual function of the T pronoun means that in its analysis both a quantitative and qualitative approach are necessary. Only manual analysis will show whether thou and thee are used as a sign of intimacy or disrespect. However, the quantitative and qualitative approach is also required in the examination of the other pronouns. As regards we and you, Ferrarotti 20

In their general study of discourse and identity construction, Benwell and Stokoe also refer to the importance of personal pronouns in identity construction and interpersonal relations (2006: 118). 21 We was the more common of the two orthographic forms. 22 For studies on pronominal usage in early modern English, see Nevala (2004) and Walker (2007).

The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620-1665)

21

(2009: 72) says that literature on their pronominal use underlines “the lack of a clear-cut and univocal function connected to pronoun uses and their referents”. We is particularly problematic since not only does it have both inclusive and exclusive reference (thus referring to either the news writer and others in the news publishing community or to both this combined group and the readers as well) but “the intended referent may vary in the same context” (Biber, Johansson et al. 1999: 329). However, as we shall see, the use of I also necessitates examination in that the pronoun can either refer to the original dispatch writer or correspondent whose text has been included in the news publication or to the editor, as in the case of Thomas Gainsford, as he guides the reader through the various news items of the day. In adopting both a quantitative and qualitative approach to pronominal usage, I shall follow the broad principles of what is often referred to as corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). The essential tenets of this model of analysis have been described, among others, by Hardt-Mautner (1995), Stubbs (1996, 2001) and Partington (1998, 2004, 2009). Haarman and Lombardo (2009: 8) succinctly state the characterizing feature of this methodology as “a constant movement back and forth between data in the form of concordances, collocations and clusters on the one hand and, on the other, the contextual information (i.e. the actual texts) retrievable by the software”. This “shunting” (Morley 2009: 10) between the concordance line and the cotext is designed to reveal more clearly the meaning of the feature being examined than would be the case by simple quantitative analysis. Also in line with CADS methodology, I would describe my initial research approach as inherently inductive. In relation to the use of personal pronouns in the above-mentioned news corpora, I am investigating a research question rather than testing a particular hypothesis. The research question is the result of introspective understanding based on a prior reading of the texts making up the corpora. However, whilst initially inductive in its approach, there is also the potential for more deductive reasoning as the first findings suggest hypotheses which can then be tested “against the data, using the Popperian deductive ‘theorythen-research’ method” (Partington 2009: 289-290).

Chapter One

22

3.2. Analysis 3.2.1. First person personal pronouns In order to see what changes occur in the use of first and second person pronouns over the four decades, I will examine their use chronologically.23 I shall begin the analysis with a review of the first person pronouns I and we/wee (henceforth we). Table 1.3 shows the frequency of these pronouns in a concordance of the individual corpora generated by the Corpus Presenter software. As the sentences in the corpora are often very long, I have limited the surrounding text in my examples to those words which show the meaning and hence give sense to the node word, that is, the pronoun under examination. Below we find examples of I and we usage in corantos (1620-1641) since it is these early news publications that will be examined first. Period 1620-1621 1622-1624 1625-1641

I 0.4 1.7 2.5

We/Wee 3.2 4.5 2.8

Table 1.3: First person pronouns (1620-1641). The figure is measured ptw (per thousand words) 1) his Excellencie being present, who as {I} vnderstand, spake to them to this effect (1620-1621) 2) and it is said that more shall be committed, and {we} are sworne to be obedient to the Duke of Bauaria (1620-1621) 3) where they also make a Bridge ouer the Rhine, {we} dayly expect something to be done (1620-1621) 4) what is com to passe betwixt both {we}shal shortly heare (1620-1621) 5) what the Duke of Newburg or Sultzbach will say to that, {we} shal hereafter know (1620-1621) 6) and therefore {I} will be as good as my word in setting downe truly his owne words (1622-1624) 7) But what the Propositions are like to be, no man {I} thinke will be so rash as to guesse at (1622-1624) 8) though {wee}cannot hope to make euery reader beleeue what {we} write, yet neuerthelesse {we} will not publish any thing (1622-1624)

23

For brevity’s sake, I shall refer to first (second, third) person personal pronouns as ‘first (second, third) person pronouns’.

The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620-1665)

23

9) And where {wee} erre in the termes of Warre, {we} desire all Gentle men Souldiers to understand it their way (1622-1624) 10) From Vienna 18. February. From Vienna {wee} haue diuers Letters, all inlarging the Newes betweene the Emperour (1622-1624) 11) Out of Brabant {we} heare, that Prince Henrick Frederick of Nassaw with certaine thousands of men (1622-1624) 12) From Amsterdam, October, 20. {we} heare also from sundry places, That the Hollanders haue taken away the Barrels (1622-1624) 13) My Lords, Whereas I doe certainely know that all the world will speake and censure diversly (1625-1641) 14) Thus goeth the world: Our Generall Tilly, whose name {I} doe beleeve is rather used to encourage us then to affright (1625-1641) 15) Thus have {I} imparted something unto you, take this in good part (1625-1641) 16) By closing up this letter {we} heard againe fierce shooting with canons about Melnick (1625-1641) 17) From Mantua {we} are certified that Don Camillo Gonzaga is departed thence (1625-1641) 18) From Spain {we} have received advice, that the great Constable of Castile is erecting the great standard (1625-1641)

In corantos we see that as regards I the lowest frequency is found in 1620-1621 when English corantos were more or less literal translations of Dutch and German newssheets. The figure, which is up to 6 times lower than other frequency values for the 20-year period, leads us to postulate that in these continental newssheets the news writer is less likely to reveal his personal role in the transmission of news. The writer is the mere chronicler of events and as such stands back from what is recorded. Furthermore, the singular pronoun only refers to the dispatch writer (1), never to an overseeing editor of the coranto publication commenting on the news for the benefit of the readers. In 1620-1621, as indeed in the other subcorpora between 1620-1641, we is more often found than I. The plural pronoun, like its singular counterpart, does not refer to the editor or publisher of the coranto but rather to the dispatch writer and the local community of which the writer is part (2, 3). Although in (4) and (5) we could appear inclusive of the coranto reader it is much more probable that here too the plural pronoun refers to the dispatch writer and his own specific community. This is because many of the news dispatches published in German and Dutch newssheets, and then successively translated into English, were originally written by various ‘informants’ including continental postmasters, diplomats and professional news

24

Chapter One

scribes who often had no idea as to the background of the coranto readers who eventually read the report on the printed page.24 In contrast to 1620-1621, the years between 1622-1624 provide quite different data. Not only is there respectively a 425% and 40% increase in the use of I and we but in their usage one finds a very different set of referents from what is found in the earlier period. Thus, although the use of the singular pronoun is seen in reference to the original dispatch writer, there are numerous examples such as (6) and (7) where the singular pronoun indicates the English coranto news writer or editor. Similarly, we is no longer just used in reference to the dispatch writer and his own exclusive community, but is instead frequently adopted to refer to the English news writer and publisher (8, 9). These four examples illustrate the willingness of the English news writer to disclose either his own identity in the case of I, or both his own and his publisher’s identity in the case of we. Given the socio-cultural context of news production at that time, this is an important development since it shows the news writer’s and publisher’s self-confidence despite their low standing with the intellectuals and literati of the day.25 The examples (10-12) are on the other hand interesting because they illustrate typical usage of we not only in corantos but also during the period 1620-1654 generally. This is because the plural pronoun is used as an introduction to the news proper providing information relating to the origin and date of the news that is successively reported. In this respect we can say that the plural pronoun acts as a framing device to the news content. With this function we frequently collocates with hear and news. Moving forward to the last period of coranto publications (1625-1641), one sees that there is a further increase in the use of I. However, whilst this figure is significant in that it indicates the news is being presented in an increasingly personal way, it does not reflect a continuation of the style found in the previous historical period of 1622-1624. The singular 24

For information relating to the world of news production and transmission in early modern Europe, see Raymond (2005), Dooley (2010) and Pettegree (2014: 167-248). 25 One denigrator was the poet, Abraham Holland, who satirized news pamphleteers in A continued inquisition against paper-persecutors (1625). Among their failings, he accuses them of writing about distant lands and events even when they had little or no understanding of the whereabouts of such places: “Whose hungry braines compile prodigious Books,/ Of Bethlem Gabors preparations, and/ How termes betwixt him and th' Emperor stand:/ Of Denmarke, Swede, Poland, and of this and that, […] Yea of the Belgique State, yet scarcely know,/ Whether Brabant be in Christendome or no”.

The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620-1665)

25

pronoun between 1625-1641 does not refer to either the editor or publisher but instead very often to correspondents whose private letters have been published in the corantos. This is so with both (13) and (14), where in the former the singular pronoun comes from “The Copie of another Letter written by Count Henry Vanden Bergh, Generall of his Majestie of Spaine” whilst in the latter the pronoun is found in an “Extract out of a letter from Maintz the 16. of November”, where the letter begins with the words “Sir , If you did now come hither againe, you would marvell at the alteration that is here”. In both of these letters the I pronoun is frequently found. The singular pronoun is also found several times in the news report comprising (15), though here, as elsewhere in this subcorpus, the news is not specifically acknowledged as being part of a letter. Instead, it has a dateline (“From Hanaw, November the 9. 1631”) though like elsewhere in the corpus a close read of the entire passage suggests that the news item was originally part of a private letter. If we now consider the plural pronoun for this period, one notices that either it is found in epistolary contexts such as (16) or very often it introduces the sundry foreign news dispatches that are so characteristic of corantos (17-18). The data for the three newsbooks subcorpora (1642-1654) are set out in Table 1.4. If we begin with the mixed newsbooks corpus of 1642-1649, we see first of all that there is a 16% increased frequency of I in comparison with what is found between 1625-1641. This leads one to presume that these newsbooks had a more personal tone than the corantos that had preceded them. This is true, but what is particularly interesting are the contexts in which the singular pronoun is found, since the concordance lines (19-25) illustrate that the pronoun I occurs in a wide range of discourse situations. Thus, whilst (19) and (20) exemplify the same epistolary context as is found with the 1625-1641 corpus, in (21-25) we see examples of the singular pronoun referring not to the dispatch writer whose report has been included in the newsbook but rather to the writer cum editor of the newsbook. This use of the singular pronoun replicates what was occasionally found between 1622-1624 since there too the coranto writer expresses his position as commentator and interpreter of the news in general through the use of I. In (21–22) we have examples of the writer straightforwardly expressing his point of view while in (23) we find the writer addressing the newsbook reader through the nominal address form “Reader”. In (24) we again find the use of editorial I though this time it is included in a few lines of satirical doggerel. Meanwhile in (25) we see a novel context for the use of the first person pronoun in that here it occurs in direct speech, with the pronoun referring to the utterance of a member of parliament.

Chapter One

26 Period 1620-1621 1622-1624 1625-1641 1642-1649 (excepting Aulicus and Britanicus) 1643-1644 (only Aulicus and Britanicus) 1650-1654 (FEEN + LNC combined)

I 0.4 1.7 2.5 2.9

We/Wee 3.2 4.5 2.8 4.3

4.2 Aulicus = 1.1 Britanicus = 8.9 1.7

3.5 Aulicus = 2.5 Britanicus = 5.2 3.8

Table 1.4: First person pronouns (1620-1654). The figure is measured ptw (per thousand words) 19) My Lord, In the posture we are in it is very possible {I} may be deceived in our Intelligence (1642-1649) 20) My Lord, {I} am not to give up the Kings Garrisons upon Summons or Letter (1642-1649) 21) {I} also told you the last weeke, what great joy there was at Oxford (1642-1649) 22) {I} was in hope, the enemy had learnt a little humility (1642-1649) 23) Reader, {I} have discharged my Conscience in confuting the confused Paper-kite of the Army (1642-1649) 24) {I} dream’t a Dreame; I saw a Monster trudge, With Fox furr’d Gowne (1642-1649) 25) and therefore Mr. Speaker (sayes he) {I} suppose ‘tis very convenient it were laid aside, and no further notice taken (1642-1649)

Moving on to the 1643-1644 subcorpus consisting of the royalist Aulicus and the parliamentarian Britanicus, one notes that while there is an increase of 68% in the number of occurrences of the singular pronoun than what is found in 1625-1641, this much higher frequency is not proportionately spread over the two publications because whilst Aulicus has the frequency value of 1.1 ptw Britanicus has the strikingly high figure of 8.9. Thus, whereas Aulicus’s use of the singular pronoun is lower than the other historical periods excepting 1620-1621, Britanicus has over 200% more occurrences of I than the second highest value of 2.9 between 1620-1654. Let us, therefore, consider some of the occurrences of I in Britanicus to see how the pronoun is used in the parliamentarian newsbook. In this subcorpus we again find examples of the singular pronoun in the published letters of third parties and in the reporting of direct speech

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27

(26-28). We also see instances of the pronoun in the citations Britanicus provides of the news as reported in Aulicus (29). 26) For the Governour of Denington-Castle Sir, {I} demand you to render to me Denington Castle (1643-1644, Britanicus) 27) For Lieutenant Generall Middleton. Sir, {I} am intrusted here by his Majesties expresse Command, and have not (1643-1644, Britanicus) 28) One cries out, {I} am lesse for the Cause since I read this Letter, and so another (1643-1644, Britanicus) 29) After a long lie upon Hull he concludes, those particulars {I} onely represent and determine nothing (1643-1644, Britanicus)

Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the 527 occurrences of I in this subcorpus refers to editorial voice. In some cases, such as (30), the explicit authorial presence underlines the writer’s commitment to the truthfulness of the news. In this instance we see the same use of the singular pronoun as is found in the 1622-1624 corpus where the editor’s professional standing and commitment to factuality is similarly constructed. Therefore, in these cases the personalized voice is reinforcing the objectivity of the reporting. This use of the first person pronoun needs to be contrasted with the numerous occasions when the writer does not just intervene in person in order to promote the seriousness of his publication, and hence of his own professional status, but rather in pursuance of his ultimate aim of reporting the “faithfullest” of news, and “to the best advantage of the Cause” (31). The acknowledgement of his “designe to advance our own [news] with truth” (32), where “our own”, like “the Cause”, refers to the parliamentarian struggle against royalist forces, explains why the subjective involvement of textual voice frequently occurs in heteroglossic construals in which the Britanicus editor in first person comments on what the royalist newsbook Aulicus had written in a previous number (33-34). In this heteroglossic framework the editor’s explicit interventions in the form of the first person pronoun reflect what White calls “heightened personal investment” (2003: 269) in the proposition. 30) The newes from Court this week is various, but {I} shall give you some particulars you may relie on (1643-1644, Britanicus) 31) I shall now […] make it my taske to give you the faithfullest and most politicke Relations of the times {I} can, and to the best advantage of the Cause (1643-1644, Britanicus) 32) Now {I} arrive at the affairs of the Kingdom, and {I} shall make it my designe to advance our own with truth, as I have declined theirs with their errors (1643-1644, Britanicus)

28

Chapter One 33) He [Aulicus] tells us againe of the small number in both Houses, three Lords and Commons; Master Aulicus, {I} had thought {I} had corrected you sufficiently for this the last weeke (1643-1644, Britanicus) 34) He [Aulicus] tells us of the many abhominable lies written by the brethren of London this weeke, Master Aulicus, hold your peace, {I} have made your Epitaph, here lies Mercurius Aulicus, and there lies Mercurius Aulicus (1643-1644, Britanicus)

The use of the first person plural pronoun in Britanicus is also higher than what is found both in Aulicus and in other subcorpora (including the 1642-1649 corpus) though the proportional difference is not so great as with I. When we is used in Britanicus and Aulicus, and to some extent in the 1642-1649 corpus, the pronoun has both exclusive and inclusive referencing. In the first case the plural pronoun refers to the editor and newsbook as a collective entity whilst in the second case the pronoun incorporates not just this grouping but more generally all those, including implicitly the reader, subscribing to the same political viewpoint as the newsbook writer. Therefore, unlike the corantos, the plural pronoun does not extend to the discourse community at large. To conclude the analysis of first person pronouns, we can refer to the FEEN and LNC corpora of periodical news texts between 1650-1654. What we see is that the frequency of the singular pronoun has noticeably diminished from the levels occurring in both the 1640s corpora. We still find editorial comment in relation to either news itself or the reporting of it (35-36), but the frequency is much less than in the Civil War publications, when many news editors, and especially Marchamont Nedham of Britanicus, saw their role as not just the purveyor of news, but more particularly provider and interpreter, with, additionally, a remit to rebut adversarial news through the first person pronoun. Therefore, in the 1650s corpus the I pronoun is generally found in dispatches written by third parties. These dispatches are usually in the form of letters, or at least epistolary extracts, which have come into the editor’s possession.26 The addresser and addressee, or one of the two, are sometimes indicated (37) but usually are not mentioned (38). 35) ‘tis part of my griefe, {I} had not leisure upon the day to behold the Solemnity (1650-1653) 36) But for these numbers, {I} will (for want of room) refer you to next week (LNC 1653-1654)

26 See Brownlees (2014a: 155-159) for newsbook publication of 1650s’ diplomatic correspondence that had first been sent to England’s Secretary of State.

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37) Loving Friend, {I} desire that ye will intimate this order to all the Gentlemen in Glackmennen-shire, and send me the just Rental of every mans Estate with this bearer; […] Your loving Friend JOHN BLAKEDOR (LNC 1653-1654) 38) From Copenhagen Decemb. Since my last {I} received yours, which gives an exact account of the Dutch loss in the late fight (LNC 1653-1654)

In line with five of the other corpora, the exception being the Britanicus corpus, the occurrences of we are higher than those of the singular personal pronoun. This is because the plural pronoun is not just used in relation to the protagonists in the news story as in (39-40) but more generally as an introduction to the news proper (41). In this respect the use of we is similar to what is found in (10-12). 39) And with this party {we} marched 6 or 7 miles into the Highlands (LNC 1653-1654) 40) {we} pursued them several miles as long as our horses would go (LNC 1653-1654) 41) From Berwick {we} hear that on Wednesday last there was a party of about 16, or 18 (LNC 1653-1654)

To sum up, what our findings have shown is that whilst the use and frequency of the plural pronoun remained relatively constant over the corpora, there are notable divergences in the frequency and use of the singular pronoun. Thus, whilst we oscillates between 2.8 and 4.5 during the four decades, I has a much greater oscillation as it varies from 0.4 to 4.2 (and 8.9 in Britanicus). The relative lack of divergence of we reflects quite a constant use of the pronoun since throughout the period it is regularly found in two specific discourse situations. In one it refers to the dispatch writer and the local community of which the writer is part, whilst in the other function we acts as a framing device for the piece of news that is successively reported. These two kinds of usage have already been exemplified in the previous pages but are further illustrated in (42) and (43). 42) {we} are in good hope that the enemy within few dayes will leaue off (1620-1621) 43) The next News {we} hear of them is; That January 3. they departed (LNC 1653-1654)

We is also found in the third-party correspondence that is occasionally reprinted in corantos and much more frequently in newsbooks. However, at particular periods in these first four decades of periodical news we refers

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to the editor. In this respect we is used both exclusively and inclusively in that sometimes the pronoun just indicates the editor and publisher whilst in other contexts the plural pronoun incorporates both editor and reader or even more widely editor, reader, and the discourse community at large. When we expresses a pronominal bonding between editor and reader, as is frequently the case with Britanicus, the author’s aim is usually persuasive. Through this overt interaction with the readership, the editor is engaged in convincing the audience to believe in a certain political or social message. As such, the usage of the plural pronoun is similar to how it is analyzed by critical discourse analysts in their examination of how the modern press attempts to create the impression of consensus around a particular editorial viewpoint. Fowler, for example, believes that the English press’s principal editorial objective is to create consensus around a general set of societal values: “ ‘Consensus’ assumes, and in times of crisis actually affirms, that within the group, there is no difference or disunity in the interests and values of any of the population” (1991: 49). In the linguistic expression of this ideology of consensus the world is divided into two pronominal spheres, ‘we’/‘they’, ‘us’/‘them’. The ‘we’/‘us’ are the newspaper, its readers, and like-minded people, while the ‘they’/’them’ are everyone else, those who by not subscribing to the former’s set of beliefs are real or potential enemies.27 It is this usage of we that is frequently found in 1640s newsbooks, and, in particular, in Britanicus. As regards the first person singular pronoun, Table 1.4 shows that with the exception of the Aulicus and Britanicus subcorpus I is used less frequently than we. This lower figure is explained by the fact that unlike we, as in (10-12) and (43), the singular pronoun is not used to introduce news items. However, apart from I’s frequency value in relation to we, one also notices the singular pronoun is subject to significant internal quantitative variation in the various subcorpora. The two subcorpora which contain the most divergent frequencies of the singular pronoun are those of 1620-1621 and the Britanicus numbers of 1643-1644. The pronoun’s scant presence of 0.4 ptw in the first period as compared to 8.9 ptw in the latter underlines two important features of news presentation in the first decades of periodical news. First, where English news is primarily based on translated continental news dispatches, the presence of firstperson singular authorial voice is very infrequently found. Thus, in 16201621, when English corantos amounted to more or less literal translations of Dutch and German newssheets, I is rarely used. Early Dutch 27 See van Dijk (2001) for an overview of the essential tenets and methodologies of critical discourse analysis.

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31

newspapers were similar to their German counterparts, which Weber (2010:73) has described as printed copies of newsletters that were “nearly exclusively dry political, diplomatic, and military reports from the whole known world”. Secondly, the frequency of I increases when news presentation is not just based on the reporting of domestic news but on the persuasive editorial focus of such news. In this respect the high frequency of the first person singular pronoun in Britanicus, and other such Civil War newsbooks, is similar if not greater to the high frequency of the first person plural pronoun in the same publications. However, in these texts there is one essential difference between I and we. The distinction lies in the way in which the two pronouns fulfill authorial purpose. With we the intention is to involve the reader in an inclusive relationship in which what is expressed by the editor is uncritically accepted by the reader too, whilst in the use of I, the writer is projecting his authority and status on what is written. In the terminology of Iedema, Feez and White (1994: 212-214), the writer with the first person singular pronoun is expressing Commentator Voice in that not only is he passing comment on the reported news but more importantly he is passing judgement as to whether it is right or wrong. This is most obviously seen in those sections of Britanicus where Nedham, the author, brands the news in Aulicus as incomplete, wrong, or more often than not intentionally false. 3.2.2. Second person pronouns The data in Table 1.4 show that the use of the second person pronouns in the FEEN corpus reflects many of the tendencies of the first person subject pronoun. Period 1620-1621 1622-1624 1625-1641 1642-1649 (excepting Aulicus and Britanicus) 1643-1644 (only Aulicus and Britanicus) 1650-1654 (FEEN + LNC)

You 1.1 2.6 1.6 1.7

Thou/Thee 0.0 0.1 0.0 0.1

5.3 Aulicus = 3.7 Britanicus = 7.6 1.7

0.3 Aulicus = 0.1 Britanicus = 0.6 0.0

Table 1.5: Second person pronouns. The figure is measured ptw (per thousand words)

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Thus, it is not surprising that the lowest frequency of you is found in the same period (1620-1621) that we also have the fewest combined frequencies of I/we. When these latter pronouns are missing, so too is frequently absent the interactive second person pronoun. The generally anonymous news writer in 1620-1621 is therefore more often than not writing to an unspecified news reader. Indeed, though there are examples of you in the first FEEN subcorpus of 1620-1621, a manual analysis of these occurrences of the pronoun indicates that you is not being used in reference to the reader but rather to the addressee of one letter printed in the coranto.28 The period in which the use of you is highest in corantos is between 1622-1624. This again reflects what is found with the first person pronouns since it was also during this period that the combined frequency of I/we is greatest in the two decades of coranto publications. In contrast to the previous two years, you in 1622-1624 is used in contexts where the news writer is engaging directly with the reader. The second person pronoun is in both subject and object position (44-47) and frequently occurs in metatextual discourses where the editor is explaining to the reader details of news presentation and content. 44) Wee write a continuation, that {you} may see by the proceedings, that there is good dependancy between the relations, wherein we purpose to keepe nere to the Lawes of Historie (1622-1624) 45) {you} shall reade of nothing, but the happie proceedings of the Emperour (1622-1624) 46) Wee tould {you} in our last Newes Printed the fifth of October, That Bethlem Gabor (1622-1624) 47) And yet for all this, there is no newes to acquaint {you} with since the last Incursions of Vanderbergen into Guelderland (1622-1624)

Therefore, the interactive use of you in this period complements the news writer’s willingness to identify himself through the use of the pronouns I and we. Through the first and second person pronouns the news writer is seeking to construct a professional identity and discourse that incorporates a close, almost confidential relationship with his readers. He is radically reworking the terms of news presentation that had been followed in 1620-1621.

28

The letter is entitled “The Copie of the Earl of Mansfields Letter sent to Don Descant to Bamberch” in Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germany, Hungaria, Bohemia, Spaine and Dutchland. 1621 (2 August 1621).

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Occurrences of you in the last subcorpus of coranto news lie between the 1620-1621 and 1622-1624 frequencies. As said in Section 1, the death in 1624 of Thomas Gainsford, the editor who had introduced the innovations in news presentation in 1622-1624, led to a return to more traditional continental modes of news writing in 1625-1641. As this writing up of news involved less editorial engagement with the reader, most instances of you occur in other contexts. These include various text types such as a print letter (48), a ‘report’ (an extended oral account addressed to a specific audience) “related at White Hall by a Dutchman”, direct speech incorporated within a news report (49), and dispatches written to an unspecified correspondent (50-51). The only clear-cut case where the second person pronoun unquestionably indicates the reader is in (52), where on the title page of the coranto you refers to the news the reader will find within the publication: 48) Extract out of a letter from Maintz the 16 of November. Sir, If {you} did now come hither againe, you would marvell at the alternation that is here (1625-1641) 49) My faithfull and loving Citizens and Soulders, to affoord {you} much Counsell in this extremitie, or any assistance, I am not able, by reason I am a prisoner (1625-1641) 50) From Bruxeles the 4. of July, stil.nov. As for newes{you} shall haue this little, which is as much, as the shortnesse of time will permit mee to set downe (1625-1641) 51) Giue me leaue briefly to relate it vnto {you}, if happily {you} are not acquainted with the manner of it (1625-1641) 52) The second part. Containing many notable and very remarkable passages, amongst the rest, {you} shall finde these (1625-1641)

These multiple contexts containing the second person pronoun emphasize how embedded much of the news discourse can be during this period. For example, the second person pronoun in the direct speech in (49) is found in a dispatch “From Hanaw the 11 of November” containing news sent to an unspecified addressee in (50) which is successively printed for the coranto reader who is directly addressed on the title page in (52). Therefore, although the first two decades of periodical news include few examples of editorial interaction with the reader, there are instances of a multi-layered dialogic framework in the communication of news. The two 1640s subcorpora show noticeably divergent figures for the second person pronoun. If one first considers the straightforward comparison of second person pronouns in the 1642-1649 and 1643-1644 Aulicus and Britanicus corpora, we see that whilst in the former the frequency of you stands at 1.7 ptw in the latter it is 5.3 ptw with 7.6 ptw in

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Chapter One

the Britanicus section. This difference in frequency is primarily motivated by one essential characteristic in Aulicus and Britanicus which is absent in the other 1640s newsbooks. While all the publications use you in editorial addresses to the reader (53-54), in print letters (including for the first time familiar correspondence) and published speeches where you refers to a third person (55-58), in Aulicus and particularly Britanicus we also see the use of the second person pronoun in hostile addresses to the adversarial newsbook and its readership (59-61).29 53) In my last, I told {you}, that on Friday, the 12. of July, 12. at night, as the three Generals were about to storme York (1642-1649) 54) Monday. Iune 10. We told {you} in the 18 Weeke of the last yeares Mercurie (1643-1644) 55) Dear Father, These are to signifie unto {you}, the certain Occurrences here (1642-1649) 56) For the Governour of Denington Castle. Sir, I demand {you} to render to mee Denington Castle (1643-1644) 57) his Majesties speech to the Houses Commissioners [...] as it was taken from his own mouth verbatim. My Lords and Gentlemen I am confident it is not unknown to {you} what a Condition I have been in (1642-1649) 58) I thinke most (if not all) of {you} are ingaged in my service, either in a Civill or a Martiall way (1643-1644) 59) Sirrah, {you} must not quarter your Lyes so neare one another when they quarrel (1643-1644) 60) This is the 22d weeke since {you} began this Lye (1643-1644) 61) no Aulicus, {you} have the blowers up of Churches and States with you (1643-1644)

Given Aulicus’s and Britanicus’s goal of rebutting and denigrating whatever news is found in the adversarial publication, the use of the second person pronoun is constant and extensive. Both publications adopt a confrontational discourse where what is attacked is personally identified in the form of the pronoun. This process of anthropomorphization impacts on the reading of both Aulicus’s and Britanicus’s texts since, as Keeble says, the personalization of news helps to simplify events and makes the complex dynamics of history intelligible (1998: 98).30 This use of you, 29 In Britanicus we also find examples of ye/yee (2.1 ptw) in a rhetorical, declamatory discourse where again the royalist newsbook and its readers are being denounced: “(O {ye} Kings party) will {ye} never leave this? Though {ye} see your treachery”, “blush {ye} superstitious, {ye} half-Episcopall, {ye} quarter Popish Clergy, {ye} Juglers”. 30 For an examination of how modern-day journalists use the rhetoric of personalization in the reporting of news, see Fowler (1991: 17-19, 91-119).

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which is very different from how the pronoun is employed elsewhere in the FEEN corpus, also explains why in the Aulicus and Britanicus subset we also find examples of thou and thee, the stylistically marked second person pronouns. Whereas Aulicus parodies the biblical register, and its consequent use of thou/thy, in the Presbyterian publication, the Scotish Dove, in (62-63), Britanicus exploits to the full the contempt subsumed in the use of thou in addressing Aulicus (64-65). 62) Truly Pigeon {thou} art in the right, there are many Covenant-traytors (1643-1644)31 63) No, Pigeon, {thou} art not of Micah’s judgement (1643-1644) 64) but {thou} art as carnall a news monger as the Kingdome hath (16431644) 65) Hast {thou} no worse language yet, and hast railed above a yeare (1643-1644)

To conclude the analysis of second person pronouns in the FEEN and LNC corpora, mention must also be made of the period from 1650-1654. The analysis for these years can be brief because although quantitatively the frequency is on a par with the 1642-1649 corpus, and higher than the periods from 1620-1621 and 1625-1641, the contexts in which the second person pronoun is found are essentially two. They are respectively the unspecified second person addressees in both dispatches and letters (6669). 66) From Edenburgh, March 29. Since my last I have little that is considerable to acquaint {you} with (FEEN 1650-1653) 67) I have in former dispatches acquainted {you}, that our affairs here suffered some delay by reason (LNC 1653-1654) 68) Sir {you} have here my piecemeal'd relations (LNC 1653-1654) 69) By thus much, My Lord, {you} may perceive the dark side of this Leading Cloud of Government (LNC 1653-1654)

There are neither editorial addresses to other news publications (as in the case of Aulicus and Britanicus) or to the reader. The news discourse contains a personal element but this is not based on the newsbook editor interacting with the reader but rather through the latter being made privy to earlier personal correspondence between correspondents whose identities are usually left unspecified. The reader is left to presume that in some 31

In this period ‘pigeon’ (the term used by Aulicus in addressing the Scotish Dove) could be used “of either sex in the sense of a ‘foolish person’ or ‘coward’” (Nevalainen 1999: 448).

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circumstances one of the correspondents could be the news editor in person but no explicit textual acknowledgement of this is given. As the news editor is not interacting directly with the reader, the former’s role is that of gate-keeper,32 since his task is limited to selecting rather than commenting on the news. However, even in this reduced capacity, where his identity remains concealed, the editor’s role is significant since through selection and choice of news he is determining the news input available to his readers. Rounding up this analysis of first and second person personal pronouns in the first four decades of English periodical news, I think that several important points emerge. The first regards the usefulness of corpora for such a research. I think it is clear that without recourse to such electronic corpora the research itself would not be practically feasible. The amount of time involved in a manual quantitative analysis of pronominal usage would discourage the carrying out of such a study. It is only through the presence of electronically-readable corpora that the historical news analyst can examine the data both quantitatively and then qualitatively through an examination of the cotext surrounding the pronouns. To quote Biber et al. (1994: 169): “the corpus-based approach enables analyses of a scope not otherwise feasible.” As for the results of the analysis, it is important to realize that although some data confirm what news historians and linguists have already broadly stated regarding some features of the period, there are also other data which provide novel insights into the presence and role of authorial voice and identity in early periodical news. Thus, whilst the lack of first person pronominal presence in the first corantos of 1620-1621 is not surprising, given what has already been written about these formative years in English news history,33 what is surprising are the sundry text types in which the first and second person pronouns are found in the following years. One’s initial expectation that the pronouns would be generally confined to interactive communication between the coranto or newsbook editor and the publication’s readers is proved wrong. Instead, we find the use of the pronouns in a much wider range of contexts including news dispatches, print letters (both public and familiar), direct speech, the framing of news items, and addresses to adversarial newsbooks. What this underlines is the heterogeneity of much periodical news of the period. There were not only various text types—expressing not just the informative but also conative functions of language—within 32

I borrow this useful term from Jucker (2005a: 19), who however uses it in relation to the ‘gate-keeping’ role of nineteenth-century journalists. 33 Frank (1961: 4-5).

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the news publications but multiple voices and identities. News readers were given news from different parts of Britain, Ireland, continental Europe, and occasionally even beyond, and such news came in the words of numerous, usually unknown news writers. Sometimes these writers were more or less professional news correspondents (as is the case of many dispatch writers scattered around continental Europe) but they could also be private correspondents whose letters were printed in the periodical news. In these cases the personalization of news is one-way in that the coranto and newsbook readers are not direct participants in the communicative act. However, in other circumstances, when we find the news editor directly addressing his readers, the latter’s involvement in the transmission of news is both direct and interactive, even to the extent that in the editorial address the editor sometimes takes it upon himself to answer readers’ comments and quite often criticisms of their news pamphlets. One such editorial address is the following where the editor (referred to here as “printer”) reveals his very conscious understanding of what his readers want from corantos and his strenuous efforts to satisfy such expectations: Gentle Reader [...] Therefore is the Printer, both with charge and paines taking, very carefull to haue his Friends abroad supply his wants at home with pertinent Letters, and acquaint him with the Printed Copies beyond the Seas, that hee may acquaint you with such true intelligence as his fortune lights vpon [...] Which seeing it is for your sake, and especially that you may make the Country far off partake of our London Newes, be so far generous to acknowledge this his kindnesse, and doe not dishearten him in his endevors, by asking impertinent questions, and crossing his good intent, by making any doubt of the truth of his intelligence. For, to vse a little protestation, I can assure you, There is not a line printed nor proposed to your view, but caries the credit of other Originalls, and iustifies it self from honest and vnderstanding authority (Newes from Europe: with the particular accidents, 19 March 1624)

4. Heads and marginalia In this section I intend to examine the form and role of heads and marginalia in early periodical news.34 By ‘heads’ I mean a word or group of words that precede and give information about a successive text or texts, whilst ‘marginalia’ is used to indicate margin captions and other 34 Heads, headlines and news structure are also further examined in Chapters 2 (4.1.1.) and 3 (3.2.) of the present volume.

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Chapter One

larger word groups inserted in the margin of the printed page. While marginalia have a primarily informative function, heads have both this and a text structuring role. In my analysis of these two paratextual features I shall focus on linguistic aspects though should a future, more in-depth examination be carried out, it would be useful to examine visual details too. These latter features include typographical and graphic features such as bold, italic, type size, woodcuts, rules35 and devices.36 These visual details are undoubtedly important, as is a knowledge of other physical characteristics of early periodical news publications such as the size and quality of paper used for corantos and newsbooks, as well as the density of print and margin width on such paper, if we are to approach a full understanding of a readers’ experience when engaging with early periodical news.37 However, in any compilation of a computerized news corpus, compilers have to consider what they wish to prioritize. In making this decision, practical considerations will be taken into account, the most important including the size and funding of the work. Here we see a significant difference between FEEN and LNC. The latter is a very large corpus but was funded by the British Academy,38 whereas the former, though of medium size for a historical news corpus, had no institutional funding. FEEN’s aim is to provide researchers with the possibility of studying linguistic and discourse features of early seventeenth-century periodical print news. If our research into this period also involves an understanding of typographic and graphic features, we need to see the hard copies of the publications themselves, a requirement that in my opinion is anyway useful even when one’s research is focused on linguistic features. In the same way that an inductive approach to corpus analysis can provide unexpected insights into the use of language in the texts under review so too can acquaintanceship with the physical properties and characteristics of the news texts inform one’s understanding of why particular language was used. My advice for all historical news analysts working with news corpora is therefore to have print outs of the original copies of at least some of the texts studied in the corpus. In my opinion, this is also recommendable even when, as in the case of LNC, some information regarding visual details is encoded. 35

Thin lines separating heads and columns. Drawings and heraldic designs. 37 See Raymond (2003: 71-83), for an analysis of costs and practices in seventeenth-century printing, and Brownlees (2014b) for how textual space both conditioned and was exploited by early modern news writers. 38 British Academy, grant references SG-33825 and LRG-35423. 36

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4.1. Heads Schneider (1999, 2000) broadly divides ‘heads’ into ‘headings’, ‘headlines’ and ‘crossheads’. Headings, the first of these terms to be analyzed below, can be further divided into report and section headings. Report headings include very general information about the following news item or dispatch. Typical report headings in early English periodical news include the numerous datelines found in corantos and newsbooks (70-72) which inform readers as to the date and source of the news text. 70) From Venice the 6. of Iuly 1621. (1620-1621) 71) Extract out of a letter from Maintz the 16. of November (1625-1641) 72) Paris, March 25 S.N.39 (LNC 1653-1654)

In the very first corantos published in Holland, and translated from Dutch and German newssheets, the news was entirely structured around such datelines. For example, the coranto of 9 July 1621 is based on the respective news accompanying each of the following: 73) From Lyons the 6 of Iune 1621, From Venice the 21 of Iune 1621, From Lentsch in Hungarie the 4. of Iune 1621, From Lentsch the 10 of Iune 1621, From Neis the 13 of Iune 1621, From Neis the 20 of Iune 1621, From Vienna the 25. of Iune 1621, From Prague the 26. of Iune 1621, From Reinhausen the 22. of Iune 1621, From Bergstrassen the 24. of Iune 1621, Out of the Upper Palatinate the 19. of Iune 1621, From the Hage the 28 of Iune 1621, From Bon the 1. of July 1621 (Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germanie, Hungarie, Spaine and France. 1621)

These thirteen datelines are semantically uniform consisting of first the place from where the news was sent (usually From + name of town) and then the date of the dispatch. The dates themselves span a whole month, the first being “Lyons the 6 of Iune 1621” and the latest “From Bon the 1. of July 1621”. What this indicates is that while the concept of recency was an important news value in the early seventeenth-century, it was much more widely interpreted than is the case nowadays. Whereas in the early twentyfirst century ‘recent’ news is what has occurred in the last twenty-four hours, or, given the Internet, perhaps even the last hour, in early seventeenthcentury European society the notion of ‘recency’ was sufficiently dilated to include dispatches telling of events taking place more than a month before 39 “S.N” stands for stilo novo, i.e. the new Gregorian calendar which was mostly adopted in continental Europe in the mid-seventeenth century.

Chapter One

40

their reading.40 As for the dispatches themselves, they were often made up of disparate news items, frequently just one or two sentences long. This model of packaging foreign news, consisting of dateline and accompanying dispatch, was very common with corantos (excepting 1622-1624 when there was often a continuous news text and no heads) and 1650s newsbooks. In contrast, during the 1640s the weekly newsbooks often structured their news around report headings that just indicated the day the news was compiled. 74) Thursday. August 31. (Aulicus, 1643-1644) 75) Monday, Feb. 23.

(1642-1649) What this meant in practice was that during the week the news was most probably written up day by day. As a consequence, more space tended to be given to the first days of the newsbook’s weekly account of events since this ensured the editor did not find himself in the difficult position of having little to write about and too much space to fill for the last day of the week.41 As with report headings, section headings provide no specific information about the following news content, but where they differ from the former is that whereas report headings offer no information at all about the subject matter, in that they just give details regarding the date and/or origin of the news, section headings give a very general orientation as to the topic of the following text or texts. In our period the publication which most frequently adopts a section heading is Britanicus, where its most direct attack of published royalist news is found in the section entitled “Aulicus”. Apart from this, in LNC we also find a non-verbal, graphic section heading in Mercurius Politicus where the advertisements at the end of most numbers are signalled by a horizontal rule both above and below the text with a pointing finger ()) to the left of the first line of the first advertisement. Schneider’s second category of heads, the headline, is defined as a group of words that summarizes “a news story in a few words. It informs quickly and accurately and/or arouses the reader’s curiosity” (2000: 48).42 40

See Brownlees (2014a: 42-46) for further analysis of datelines in corantos. A good example of little news coverage being given to the last day of the week is seen in the fourth, fifth and sixth numbers of Aulicus in 22-28 January, 29 January-4 February, 5-11 February 1643 (FEEN 1643-1644) where the space devoted to Saturday news is consistently limited. 42 For more on headlines, see Märdh (1980), Gieszinger (2000), Studer (2008: 113139). 41

The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620-1665)

41

Summarizing headlines have verbal character, meaning in practice that either they contain words with finite or non-finite verb forms, or words where the verb has been ellipted and therefore could be reinserted, or even groups of words where despite the absence of an explicit or ellipted verb a number of actions are expressed through adjectives and prepositions. An example of this latter kind of headline, which Schneider calls ‘relational’ (Schneider 2000: 57), is “Barbarous murder of a wife by her husband”, while examples of both explicit and ellipted verbal headlines are “Hopes turned to dust” and “Pope in Rome” (Studer 2008: 142,143). Bearing these features of headlines in mind, one needs to consider if there are any heads in FEEN and LNC which can be regarded as full or partial headlines. The question is relevant on two counts. First, because it can provide a better understanding as to the history of the summarizing headline since in the literature such headlines are usually credited as developing in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Iedema, Feez and White 1994: 104; Garst and Bernstein 1982: 92). Secondly, if the heads have a summarizing function, they provide yet further evidence of the editor’s interpretative role in the presentation of news at that time. With the headline the journalist provides an abbreviated message, summarizing the following text and labeling it.43 Through an analysis of the two corpora, one sees that there are three possible instances of heads used in the form of headlines. They are seen in 76-78) and are found in the FEEN subcorpus of 1642-1649. 76) York is surrendred. The Articles mentioned. Foure Judges accused. Two Priests apprehended. (The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, 16-23 July 1644) 77) His Majesty backe to Woodstock come. Brave Waller advanced to Buckingham. Greenland house utterly defaced. Stubborne York likely to be razed. Sir Thomas Fairfax is pursuing. And Rupert neere undoing. (A Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages, 10-17 July 1644)

43

Whereas in the modern era headlines are written by the sub-editor, in seventeenth century newsbooks it was the editor himself who decided upon the appropriate wording.

42

Chapter One 78) New Propositions for Peace agreed upon by the house of Commons to be sent to the Kings Majesty. The summoning of Hereford by his excellency the Lord Gen. Leven, and the Parliaments Commissioners, with the true Copy of their summons, and the Governours Answer [...] (Mercurius Civicus, 31 July-7 August 1645)

From a formal internal point of view the heads in (76) satisfy the above-mentioned requirements of summarizing headlines since they are concise, informative and, furthermore, contain an explicit or ellipted verb. In (77) the first four heads also conform to formal internal features of headlines. On the other hand, the sixth head of this group, together with the heads in (78) fail to satisfy such conditions. The former (“And Rupert neere undoing”) is not a stand-alone head, but rather is linked through “And” to “Stubborne York likely to be razed”, while the heads in (78) are too long to be classified as headlines. However, aside from the identification of the communicative and formal features of these heads, we must also consider the position of these words on the printed page in relation to the texts to which they refer. Whereas our common understanding of headlines is that they are placed immediately above the text about which they are giving information, in (76-78) the heads are at the top of the front page of the newsbook and hence completely separate from their accompanying texts. Does this marked spatial separation therefore prevent the heads from being considered headlines? The answer is not clear-cut because whilst one’s initial response might be affirmative we also have to consider that the word ‘headline’ is also used for heads on the radio and on the internet where either there is a time lapse between head and news story, in the case of the former, or a spatial separation in the case of the latter, when the head needs to be clicked if the reader wishes to read the news story accompanying the internet head. In my opinion, the heads in (76) and (77) (with the above-mentioned exception of the last in this latter group) can be called headlines, but, having concluded that, it is also clear that for an informed discussion of the existence or otherwise of summarizing headlines in the Civil War years we need to go beyond what is identified in the FEEN corpus. From a methodological point of view we find ourselves in the situation where the findings in the corpus both require and spur us on to additional consultation of the vast array of original sources only some of which have been digitized in FEEN. In Section 3 of this chapter the corpora consulted provided sufficient information for our research question regarding the use of first person personal pronouns, but as regards heads, and whether or not Civil War periodical news made much use of them in the form of headlines, the corpus at our disposal does not provide sufficient

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43

information. We, therefore, need to return to the original news publications for supplementary material.44 A corpus must be regarded as a support not a limit to our research. As Rissanen says (1989: 16), “in the historical study of language, there is a risk that corpus work and computersupported research methods will discourage the student from getting acquainted with original texts, from being on really intimate terms with his material”. If we now turn our attention to ‘crossheads’, Schneider’s final category of heads, we see that in FEEN and LNC they are not used at all. The typical modern-day crosshead, consisting of one or two words placed above a paragraph in the body of an article, and designed to provide both visual relief as well as a summarizing function of the following paragraph, are absent in both corantos and newsbooks. There is no doubt that the high cost of paper in seventeenth-century England was one of the contributing factors to the absence of this form of head. As paper amounted to between half and three-quarters of the production costs of a printed work,45 the need to avoid all wasted space on the page was paramount. For this reason corantos and newsbooks offer very little visual relief and minimal spacing between one news report and another. As conclusion to this analysis on heads, brief mention can be made of the occasional multi-word introductory texts that fall outside Schneider’s broad classification. Often they introduced letters, ‘relations’ (extended monothematic news reports) or political documents that had been placed in the public sphere. As can be seen in (79-81), the heads sometimes provided detailed information regarding the contents of the accompanying text. 79) The Copie of a Letter which Count Henry vanden Bergh, Generall of his Majesties Army, wrote to the Arch-Dutches Infanta Isabella, concerning the discontent, and displeasure which he hath received, and his resolution for the welfare of the Countryes (1625-1641) 80) A true relation of the late fight at Sea, betwixt the Spanish Armado vnder the commaund of Generall Don Anthonio Oequendo, and the Holland Armado vnder the commaund of Generall Adrian Pater; betweene the Baja Porto Sancto and Farnambuco (1625-1641) 81) Concerning the Agreement betwixt the Emperour and the King of Hungarie, it is past on these conditions (1622-1624) 44 For example, further research could be carried out into front-page heads that are sometimes found in the 1640s newsbooks, Certaine Informations, The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, The Scotish Dove and early numbers of Mercurius Civicus. 45 See Raymond (2003: 72-73) for further details on the cost and production of paper.

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Chapter One

4.2. Marginalia Marginalia, a common feature in English Renaissance books (Slights 2001), the Marprelate polemical tracts of the 1580s and the English printed bible (Tribble 1993) are only occasionally found in early periodical print news. In the FEEN and LNC corpora their presence is limited to one single coranto46 and a Civil War newsbook. However, as the newsbook in question, Britanicus, played such a central role in the dissemination of periodical news and, of course, propaganda in the Civil War, it is worth examining the extensive use of marginalia in this parliamentarian publication. On the printed page the marginalia appear as below: And that our victories may go out in a longer line, the powers of the Earle of Tenbigh, Sir Thomas Middleton, and Sir William Brereton, have raised the Siege at Oswestree, and taken according to this List. Prisoners taken at Oswestree, July 3. 1644. Francis Newport heir to the Lord Newport. Captain Swynerton, Captains of a Troop of horse. 20. Welch and Shropshire Gentlemen. 1. Coronet of horse which had no command. Lieu. Norrell. 1. Quartermaster. 2. Corporals. 32 Troopers. 2. Pieces of Artillery […] The Noble Earl hath now begirt Shrewsbury with about 5000. horse and foot, He is now so inured to get Victories, that me thinkes I see the gates of Shrewsbury opening to him. Rupert hath called divers broken troopes together, about 60. as some say, he makes towards Lancashire, but the blood that he shed there will no doubt meet him, and be revenged on him before he get to Leverpoole. It is thought some of the Northern forces are joyned with him, but the fresh powers of Sir John Meldrum, Sir William Brereton, and those under Lieutenant Generall Cromwell, will not suffer him to spend his dayes in Recruiting. We expect the newes of the surrender of Yorke daily, Yorke Minster and Common Prayer, hold out longer, then one would thinke. King, Newcastle, and Widdrington are trying their fortune by water, since they have lost all by land. 46

A relation of the weekely occurrences (22 October 1622).

Gallant Earl of Denbigh.

Shrewsbury gates opening.

Rupert met before he get Leverpoole.

York Minster and Common prayer hold out still

The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620-1665)

45

His Majestie made Bonnefires in the Morning, and our three Generalls put them out again before Night. (Britanicus, 8-15 July 1644)

These margin words and captions are encoded in FEEN and can be analyzed as regards both syntax and function. From a syntactic point of view, the words above exemplify how the marginalia range from noun phrases (“Gallant Earl of Denbigh”) to elliptical and incomplete sentences in which a tensed verb is required for the completion of the sentence (“Shrewsbury gates […]”) to complete sentences (“York Minster […]”) to more complex syntactic structures containing a verbal element (“Rupert met […]”). Both the syntactic breakdown and further examples of the marginalia are given below: Structure Proper noun phrases (e.g. 82-85)

Percentage in Britanicus 27

Common noun phrases (86-87)

43

Containing ellipted verbal element (88-90) Simple sentence (91-93) More complex structure (94-96) including subordination/ coordination

19

Table 1.6: Marginalia in Britanicus. 82) Oxford. 83) Yorkshire. 84) Lady D’Aubigny. 85) Captain Wingate. 86) A Visit. 87) Westerne Gentry. 88) The Suburbs of Yorke taken. 89) The Princes Court being purged of Malignancy. 90) Western cloud much dissipated. 91) The people of the West rise for the Parliament. 92) The enemies march to Broadway. 93) Britanicus has his taske. 94) Aulicus tells us we are sorry, when indeed we are so.

9 2

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Chapter One

95) The King writes to his Nephew Rupert, that nothing but impossibilities should hinder. 96) His Majestie advanced and we asleep. The proportion of marginalia containing a verbal element (30%) is therefore high. This is important since it is through this verbal feature that the words acquire the characteristic of a headline. From a functional point of view, those marginalia possessing a verbal feature have the same summarizing function that we associate with modern-day headlines. The fact that the words were placed in the margin and not above the separate news items was just a matter of practicality. Since paper was so expensive, it was only the margins that could be exploited for the inclusion of additional text over and above the news in the body text. Likewise the use of such marginalia in a Civil War newsbook edited by Marchamont Nedham is by no means coincidental. The Civil War led not just to an explosion in news print but to considerable experimentation in the presentation of news discourse. This experimentation took many forms and one of its most active practitioners was Marchamont Nedham, principal writer of Britanicus.47 What we see in Nedham’s exploitation of marginalia is similar to his exceptional use of first person pronouns that was examined in 3.2 of this Chapter: in both cases the news writer is underlining his role in the communication of news. Far from being written by a detached and frequently distant observer as is the case in many corantos and 1650s newsbooks, the news provided by Nedham is news where the author’s presence is very evident. It exemplifies just how far early periodical English news oscillated between the totally impersonal recount of news to a news narrative that was markedly personal and author-centred.

5. Conclusions Although a general discussion regarding the entire period from 1620 to the present day will be found in Conclusion at the end of this volume, I would like to finish this present Chapter with a few observations as to how the present corpus-based analyses have informed our understanding of the first decades of periodical news and what work can still be done. In my opinion, what our examination of first person personal pronouns and heads shows is the considerable variation in news presentation during 47 See Brownlees (2014a: 117-134) for different modes of experimentation in news presentation during the English Civil War.

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these years. Thus, although at first sight the pronominal data appear quite uniform, closer manual inspection shows that in fact pronominal usage includes a wide range of voices and identities both regarding the news writers and addressees. Likewise fluctuating is the use of heads. Here too we find change, experimentation, innovation and conservation as the editor cum news writer, for they were frequently the same person, determines how not just to structure the news but also at times to best interpret it for the readers. This analysis has been carried out with the aid of two electronic corpora, FEEN and LNC. They have been invaluable in not only providing the essential, preliminary quantitative data but also in granting at the click of a button the textual context which can sometimes be necessary for a full understanding of usage. However, while invaluable in their ability to facilitate and aid research, we have also seen in relation to heads that electronic corpora are not always self-sufficient since we often need to consult the hard copies themselves, if only to see how news is packaged graphically on the page. As for future research, it is to be hoped that scholars will continue to focus attention on these early highly dynamic years of print news. Other potentially interesting lines of enquiry during this period involve the deictics of time and space, and what they tell us about early modern news transmission, reporting verbs in early news discourse (and whether or not they changed over time), and most intriguingly of all perhaps the question of whether and how the language of domestic news reports differed from the news discourse found in foreign news dispatches.48 Through this analysis we will be able to develop a closer understanding of how far, if at all, the discourse of English news differed from its counterpart in continental Europe.

48

Initial research into the translation of European news has been carried out by Valdeón (2012) and Barker (2013). See also the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/rcc.

CHAPTER TWO NEWSPAPERS FROM 1665 TO 1765 UDO FRIES

Outline of chapter In this chapter the development and the language of newspapers between 1665 and 1765 will be discussed in the light of establishing news corpora. The first section will give an overview of studies of the history of early newspapers and the possibilities that open up for linguistic studies by using machine-readable corpora. The second section will present the data for a corpus by giving a survey of the news publications in that period. The third section will look at the individual parts of the newspapers, and the final one will present studies carried out in the various areas of linguistics performed with the help of electronic corpora.

1. The study of early English newspapers The study of the history of English newspapers of the period discussed here goes back for almost a century. Stanley Morrison’s study of 1932 is the first major achievement in the field, but scholars had been interested in the early history of English newspapers much earlier. Collections of early newspaper titles can already be found in The Dictionary of Printers and Printing (Timperley 1839), taken up in the 20th century in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (Watson 1971) and most recently in the MLA catalogue of British newspapers and periodicals from 1641 to 1700 by Nelson et al 1987. Studies in newspaper history abound: studies in the 19th century set in with F. K. Hunt (1850), followed by Alexander Andrews (1855), James Grant (1871-2), Charles Pebody (1882), Henry Richard Fox Bourne (1887) and lead right down to the beginning of the 21st century.

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All these studies were written from the point of view of the general or newspaper historian. Among the more recent studies is Sutherland (1986),1 which is still one of the best books providing background information on late 17th-century newspapers. Black (1987) is the most frequently quoted book, but partly superseded by Black (2001). More recent useful books are Sommerville (1996) and Jones (1996: 51-72). Brief surveys by linguists can be found in the doctoral dissertations by Schneider (2002), auf dem Keller (2004: 10-11), and Studer (2008: 15-19), and in the excellent survey by Claridge (2010). With the rise of machine-readable corpora it has become easier to access newspaper texts of the late 17th and 18th centuries. To begin with, one must distinguish between newspaper collections and electronic corpora. Until quite recently the only large-scale newspaper collection was the microfilm version of many of the newspapers of the late 17th and the 18th century compiled by the British Library, based on the Burney Collection of Newspapers, which consists of newspapers from 1603 to 1817. Quite recently, facsimile page images of all these papers have become available in digitized format at the British Library in London. The introductions to the individual papers of the digital version gives additional information on some of the papers and makes frequent reference to Watson (1972) and to Nelson et al (1987). For many of the early newspapers the Burney Collection has a large number of issues available, but there is quite a range of papers for which only a few issues or even none at all are in this collection. One should be aware of this fact when one wants to prepare a representative corpus of early newspapers. Another useful collection is the one housed by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. All the issues of the London Gazette, from its beginnings to the present day, are available online as facsimile page images (London Gazette 2011). The advantage of facsimile page images is that you can check the original newspaper, make printouts and study the texts. What you cannot easily do is any kind of search of individual words. Neither the early newspapers in the British Library nor the London Gazette lend themselves easily to searches of these. The number of wrong results far outweighs the number of correct ones. Corpora differ from normal collections of texts in as far as the selection of texts is based on some criteria that aim at representativeness in one way or another. The major corpora including newspaper texts of the period studied here are the Rostock Newspaper Corpus and the ZEN 1

A very useful book, with a list of “the more important London newspapers from 1660-1720”.

Newspapers from 1665 to 1765

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Corpus. There are also other corpora that include newspaper texts of the 18th century, such as the ARCHER Corpus with a small selection of papers up to the 20th century. The Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC, The Rostock Historical English Newspaper Corpus from 1700 to today) consists of 600,000 words sampled from ten British newspapers in 30 (and 40)-year-intervals, with the same number of words for each period. It will be the basis of the next chapter and will be presented there. The ZEN Corpus (The Zurich English Newspaper Corpus) consisting of 1.6 million words is at the moment the largest corpus of late 17th- and 18th-century newspapers. It was compiled to serve as a basis for capturing the development of English newspaper language in 10-year intervals, beginning in 1671 and ending in 1791.2 The texts in the ZEN Corpus were collected in the mid 1990s by Udo Fries from the microfilm version of the Burney Collection, a few additional samples from newsbooks of the late 17th century were added by Patrick Studer. Although it was possible to include newspapers from 12 subsequent decades, it was not possible to collect 12 sub-corpora of equal size. In fact, the number of words for the individual decades varies considerably, due to the availability and number of individual newspapers for each decade.3 Some of the problems arising from these circumstances will be addressed in the appropriate places. What makes the ZEN Corpus unique for a corpus collected as a one-man enterprise almost 20 years ago is the fact that it provides facsimile page images, which help the user check the correctness of the data, most of which were keyed in by undergraduate students.4 The general idea behind electronic corpora of newspapers is that they should enable the user to study the language of a specific text class. Their advantage is that search programmes of many kinds can be applied to them. The corpora should provide material for both synchronic and diachronic studies, for studies of the state of the newspaper language of any particular year or a particular decade or for studies of the development of newspaper language of one or several newspapers over one or more decades, in our case from 1665 to 1765, or of any sub-period thereof. For the period discussed here, the Rostock Newspaper Corpus provides data for the years 1700, 1730, and 1760, the ZEN Corpus from every decade 2

The years indicate the beginning of each decade. In actual fact, occasionally newspapers from the preceding and the following year are also included. 3 These problems were first addressed in Fries and Lehmann (2006: 91-92). 4 A detailed description of the ZEN Corpus and its coding scheme are given in Lehmann, auf dem Keller and Ruef (2006), a brief survey in Fries (2006b: 113114).

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Chapter Two

from 1671 to 1761. Book length studies of the language of newspapers of this period are based on one of the two corpora. Schneider (2002) is based on the Rostock Newspaper Corpus and covers the whole period from 1700 to the present day, whereas Studer’s (2008) stylistic study, is based on selections from the ZEN Corpus, the years 1701, 1741 and 1771. Auf dem Keller (2004) is a study on medical and book advertisements of the whole time span the ZEN Corpus provides. The study of the language of early English newspapers by traditional methods and with the help of machine-readable corpora should ideally supplement each other. It very much depends on the right search programmes whether a linguistic topic can be studied profitably with a machine-readable corpus. Morphological studies are probably easiest, whereas pragmatic or text linguistic studies may be more difficult to undertake, as they very much depend on the collection of full texts including their headlines. The larger the area of study, e.g. the whole lifespan of any one newspaper,5 or the more items there will be available for study, the easier and the more interesting will be the use of big corpora. But electronic corpora also lend themselves to interesting manual analyses. What corpora cannot provide is the background knowledge without which the results of newspaper studies could easily be skewed. Claridge (2010) discusses this in some detail in her chapter on “News discourse”. Some of her points will be mentioned where necessary in the following chapter, which gives an outline of the newspapers available between 1665 and 1765,6 the main purpose of which is to evaluate which newspapers should be included in an ideal corpus of the newspapers of the period. The chapter does not refer to the people behind the publication of these newspapers, their editors and printers, nor to details of political struggles between different papers, which is the topic of the histories of newspapers mentioned above.7 The ZEN Corpus gives only a small selection of the wealth of papers available. For future studies it is not only important to 5

This would be particularly interesting. The only newspaper that survived the whole span is the London Gazette, which however turned almost entirely into a paper for the printing of proclamations and official advertisements. 6 The relevant extra-linguistic, socio-historical conditions, such as the “technological, infrastructural, political and socio-demographic developments” (Claridge 2010: 587) will only be referred to as far as necessary for an understanding of the development of the press. This will also include the government’s legislation of the press. The legal and financial problems caused by various Stamp Acts during the whole period will also be addressed. 7 Cf. also the detailed study of political debates in newspapers by Winkler 1998.

Newspapers from 1665 to 1765

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add texts from newspapers already in the ZEN Corpus, but also to add selections from other papers so as to arrive at a more comprehensive and truthful picture of the language of early English newspapers than is now possible.

2. The English press: The first 100 years Introduction The term ‘newspaper’ allegedly occurring the first time in 1670 (Claridge 2010: 590)8 is used here in a wide sense, including all periodical publications irrespective of their frequency of publication,9 which published news, prototypically foreign news. They range from daily, biweekly, tri-weekly to weekly publications. The first 70 years between 1665 to about 1735 saw an unprecedented rise in the number of news publications all over the British Isles: in London, in Edinburgh, and in English provincial towns. This did not happen from one day to the next, it took its time and it was not completed by 1735, but continued throughout the period discussed here, until the early 1760s. The first one hundred years can easily be divided into three periods of roughly 30 years each. The first period leading us to the end of the 17th century is characterized by the dominance of the London Gazette, the paper that has often been called the first English newspaper. This dominance came to an end in 1695 with the publication of the first of a number of tri-weeklies, among them The Post Boy and The Post Man. The first 30 years of the 18th century saw an explosion of newspapers, beginning with the publication of the first English daily newspaper, The Daily Courant, in 1702, the first evening paper, The Evening Post, in 1709, which was followed by many other newspapers, including the first provincial and Scottish papers. Towards the end of this period, leading us on to 1760, a number of weekly journals introduced by a leading essay added to the variety of newspapers, and finally, the first paper relying entirely on advertisements, The Daily Advertiser, was published in 1731, and the first of a new type of monthly magazines came on the market, The Gentleman’s Magazine, also in 1731. 8

Claridge (2010: 590) refers to the OED, which, however, gives as first quotation a letter of 1667 by the Earl of Arlington, and as second quotation a line from the Westminster Gazette of 1670. OED Online: sub newspaper. 9 For similar, slightly more elaborate definitions cf. Weber 2006: 387 (also quoted in Claridge 2010: 599, who also mentions Black 1987: xiv and Frank 1961: 1).

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2.1. The 17th century: From the London Gazette to the Post Boy 2.1.1. The era of the London Gazette There were two publications, which started to appear in 1665 and 1666 respectively: The London Gazette and The Current Intelligence, which fundamentally changed the history of the English press. The first issue of the London Gazette appeared under the name The Oxford Gazette on 16 November 1665 during the time the English Court had fled London and resided in Oxford because of the Great Plague that ravaged in the capital. After the Court’s return, the paper was renamed The London Gazette, from number 24 onwards, dated “From Thursday, February 1 to Monday, February 5, 1665”.10 The London Gazette11 looked different from the newsbooks of the day in several significant ways. Its name was restricted to the top of the front page, followed by the line Published by Authority, after which the news immediately followed, printed in two columns. The size of the newspaper was a half sheet of paper, printed on the front and the reverse side.12 If necessary, a second half sheet was added leading to a four-page newspaper. This was, e.g., the case in September 1666, when the London Gazette reported about the Great Fire in London.13 10 The beginning of a new year at that time started on Lady Day, 25 March. Therefore, the year given on the title page of the London Gazette is 1665, but in modern reckoning it would be 1666. There has always been a certain amount of confusion to which year publications with dates between 1 January and 24 March belong, as it is not always clear whether ‘Lady Day dating’ or modern dating was used. Here modern dating is used throughout the chapter. 11 The History of the London Gazette is most extensively described by Handover (1965), who provides a detailed history of the newspaper from 1665 to 1965, its editors and their ways of providing and presenting the news. The paper still exists today, albeit in a very different form and function. 12 A half sheet of paper is 11 ¼ x 6 ¾ inches, printed on both sides (Handover 1965: 10). 13 “The London Gazette, From Monday, Septemb 3, to Monday, Septemb 10, 1666: Whitehall, Sept. 8. The ordinary course of this paper having been interrupted by a sad and lamentable accident of Fire lately hapned in the City of London: it hath been thought fit for satisfying the minds of so many of His Majesties good Subjects who must needs be concerned for the Issue of so great an accident, to give this short, but true Accompt of it.” On its third page, 2nd column, the paper concludes its report: “The following list of buildings destroyed in this terrible disaster hath been taken: 13,200 Houses, 87 Churches, 6 Chapels, The Royal Exchange, The Custom House, Jail at Newgate, Three City Gates, The Guildhall and Four bridges.” A facsimile of the

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55

More importantly, The London Gazette was the first paper to appear at regular intervals, twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. The reason for choosing these days was that these were the days for immediate postage to the major English towns.14 The Current Intelligence, a second official paper (also Published by Authority) first came out on 4 June 1666. It appeared for only three months, and had to stop publication after 23 August 1666, when its premises were destroyed by the Great Fire. This gave the London Gazette a monopoly status for the next thirty years: for a whole generation. The almost synonymous title Currant Intelligence was used by several papers 15 years later, in 1680 and 1681, which has caused occasional confusion.15 Besides the London Gazette, handwritten newsletters and newsbooks continued to be produced and read—especially in the newly established coffee-houses. In 1679 and the following years, a considerable number of unlicensed news publications appeared (Sutherland 1986: 15ff). By that time the London Gazette with its new format had been well established, which was followed by a wealth of short-lived, even extremely short-lived papers, some of which appeared only once or for a few issues,16 others at least for a few months,17 with ever changing titles, some of which four pages can be found at http://www.exmsft.com/~davidco/History/fire1.htm. (accessed 1 February 2011). 14 As the postal services improved, newspapers could be published more frequently. 15 The papers are The currant intelligence: or an impartial account of transactions both forraign and domestick. No 1, 14 Feb 1680, The currant intelligence: or an impartial account of transactions both foreign and domestick, No. 1, 13 March (1680) and The Currant Intelligence. No. 1, 26 April 1681 – no. 70, 24 Dec 1681 (Watson 1971: col.1317). 16 For instance: The English Currant. or, Advice Domestick & Forreign (Published for general satisfaction), one issue in the Burney Collection: 8 September 1679, Mercurius Publicus; Being a Summary of the Whole Weeks Intelligence, 2 issues in the Burney Collection: from February to March 1680. The Catholick Intelligence; Or, Infallible News Both Domestick and Forreign (Published for the Edification of Protestants) carried only church news from the Continent, 5 issues in the Burney Collection: March 1680). 17 For instance, Mercurius Anglicus; or, the Weekly Occurrences Faithfully Transmitted, continued as True News; or Mercurius Anglicus Being The Weekly Occurrences Faithfully Transmitted. (between November 1679 and May 1680). The Domestick Intelligence; Or news both from City and Country (July 1679 to January 1680), continued as The Protestant (Domestick) Intelligence, December 1680 – 15 April 1681, did not carry any foreign news. On the other hand, Mercurius Civicus, Or A True Account of Affairs both Forreign and Domestick. (22 March – 6 May 1680), continued as Mercurius Civicus: or an Account of Affairs both Foreign and Domestick, perhaps continued as Mercurius civicus: or

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indicated their political or religious affiliation. A corpus should at least include some of these very early newspapers to supplement the texts from the London Gazette. The ZEN Corpus was originally designed for these years to include the London Gazette only, but successively a number of newsbooks were added primarily to increase the overall number of words. It can now be used with or without these additions. Year

Abbrev.

Title

1671

LGZ

The London Gazette Current Intelligence

CUI

LGZ

LGZ

Total

28,576 15,397

20

43,973

The London Gazette Various newsbooks

10 18 28

20,630 34,866 55,496

The London Gazette Various newsbooks

7

19,504

21

65,681

28

85,185

Total 1691

Number of words

6

Total 1681

Number of issues 14

Table 2.1: Number of issues and words of newspapers in the ZEN Corpus for the 17th century. 2.1.2. The lapse of the Licensing Act, 1695: The age of the tri-weeklies In the middle of the 1690s, new developments set in. In 1693 the Licensing Act, which had ensured censorship prior to publication, was renewed once again. In 1695, however, it lapsed and Parliament—after long discussions—failed to renew it (Feather 2006: 305ff).18 Publishers immediately tested their new freedom, “the English press erupted with a profusion of political and religious tracts, newspapers, satires, broadsides, and other types of printed matter” (Snyder 1967: 326). A number of newspapers that were to appear three times a week came quickly on the market. The first of these was The Post Boy, published first the City Mercury, had both foreign and domestic news. For The Currant Intelligence see footnote 14. 18 A detailed description of the moves in Parliament is given by Astbury (1978).

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57

on 14 May 1695, and it was followed five months later by The Post Man, which started to appear on October 24 1695 and in appearance looked very much the same as the Post Boy. The Post Boy extended its name to The Post Boy, With Foreign and Domestick News in its third issue, but from no. 61, 19 June 1695 onwards it was again simply called The Post Boy. In 1710/1 it was renamed The Post Boy, With the Freshest Advices, Foreign and Domestick, and in 1720 returned once again to the title The Post Boy.19 The Post Man: And the Historical Account, &c. was published until 21 February 1730. It kept its name throughout its history. The third paper to be first published before the turn of the century was the Flying Post: or, the Post-Master, which for the first time appeared on 25 February 1696 and lasted even longer than the Post Man. It ceased to exist with no. 2089, on 25 December 1733.20 As Black (1987: 13) writes “These three tri-weeklies were to dominate the press for many years”. All of them were morning papers, published on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, which had become the days the post left London for the provincial towns. Even the London Gazette followed suit and switched to tri-weekly publication in June 1709, but it switched back to Tuesdays and Saturdays in 1725. There were other tri-weeklies less frequently mentioned: among them The London News-Letter with Foreign and Domestick Occurrences, (from April to June 1696). At the turn of the century, another important morning paper, The English Post, Giving an Authentick Account of the Transactions of the World, Foreign and Domestick came out in 1700 and survived as The English Post; with News Foreign and Domestick until 1709. It appeared on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. All these tri-weeklies should be included in a machine-readable corpus. The year 1701, which was chosen for the ZEN Corpus, was a lucky choice, but it missed out on the London News-Letter. For a diachronic study of these papers, the ZEN Corpus included these tri-weeklies of the years 1711 and 1721 (except for the English Post). At the same time, however, also new papers of the traditional type emerged, published only once or twice a week, many of which lived for a few issues only, but they all enlarged the market of news publications in the last five years of the 17th century. The English Courant, for instance, made it to only two issues (25 May and 29 May 1695). Other titles included The Weekly News-letter: or, An Exact and Impartial Account of 19

With no. 6,131, 1 October 1728, it became a daily paper, The Daily Post Boy, and it lasted until 1736. 20 According to Black (1987: 13) a paper called The Flying Post appeared already on 6 May 1695.

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the most Remarkable Occurrences, Foreign and Domestick. Faithfully Collected from the Foreign Gazettes, and Private Letters (June to July 1695), Intelligence Domestick and Foreign, continued with the impressive title Intelligence Domestick and Foreign, with the Flying Post-Boy from the Camp in Flanders, then Foreign and Domestick News; with the Pacquet Boat from Holland and Flanders: being an Historical Account of the Publick Transactions of Europe and finally, Pacquet boat from Holland and Flanders (all between May and July 1695). The following years brought forth The Protestant Mercury: Occurrences Foreign and Domestick (1696–1700), The Old Post-Master (June to July 1696), An Historical Journal: or an Impartial Account in English and French of the most considerable occurrences in Europe (1697), The London Post with the Newest Intelligence both Forreign and Domestick (1697), which came to be simply The London Post in 1705 (in the Burney Collection from 1699 to 1705), and —with a longer lifespan—Dawk’s News-letter (1696– 1716). Again, for more detailed studies, these papers should not be excluded from a corpus, as they were a significant contribution to the news publications of the late 17th century.

2.2. The eighteenth century (1): 1700 – 1730. From the Daily Courant to the Daily Advertiser 2.2.1. The London papers As we have seen, the papers of the last decade of the 17th century spilled over to the 18th century. The next decisive step in the history of English newspapers was the publication of the first daily paper, The Daily Courant, of 11 March 1702. It was the first paper with the word daily in its title and it appeared every morning on weekdays, Mondays to Saturdays. It began as a very small paper of a single sheet only, but soon developed into a newspaper of four, and occasionally, six pages. It existed for a little more than three decades, until it was closed down on 28 June 1735. The ZEN Corpus includes the Daily Courant only for 1711 and 1731. A more inclusive corpus should also take samples from the first year of its existence, 1702, and, of course, for 1721. It took 17 years21 before the next daily paper was published: The Daily Post, first published on 3 October 1719, with almost 6,000 issues, lasted 21

There was a short-lived daily paper in 1715. Ten issues of The Daily Oracle appeared from 1 August to 11 August 1715.

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until 14 February 1746. Two years after the Daily Post, The Daily Journal started on 24 January 1721. It lasted until 9 April 1737. These three publications were the most influential London daily newspapers until 1728, when the Post Boy changed into yet another daily paper: The Daily Post-Boy. All the papers mentioned so far, both the tri-weeklies and the daily papers, appeared in the morning. On 6 September 1709 the first evening paper, The Evening Post, appeared in London.22 It started life as a daily, but after a few weeks it switched to a tri-weekly, published on the usual days, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It lasted until 5 February 1732, and was then continued as B. Berington’s Evening Post until 29 August 1740. It must have been worthwhile publishing a paper in the evenings. There was a short-lived Evening Courant with five issues in July 1711, and another paper called The Night Post with 68 issues in 1712 and 1713.23 It reprinted, among others, articles from the London Gazette and translated from the Amsterdam Courant. From the end of 1715, the next important tri-weekly evening paper, The St. James’s Evening Post, was published on the same days as The Evening Post and lasted until 1761. The Whitehall Evening Post followed in 1718. It was started by Daniel Defoe, who was a regular contributor until 1720. In the 1740s it was called the Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer. The paper lasted right into the beginning of the 19th century. The next in the series of evening papers was the London Evening Post, founded almost twenty years after the first issues of the Evening Post. It was first published on 12 December 1727, and coming out three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, it lasted until 1806. Initially a quarto, its four pages later increased to folio size and it “derived much of its content from the morning newspapers” (Notes in the Burney Collection). For a representative corpus, a good number of these evening papers from the middle of the 18th century should be included, preferably of the same weeks as the morning papers, which would both enable a comparison between the two types of papers and also the possibility to verify the frequently mentioned fact that evening papers shamelessly copied from the morning papers. The ZEN Corpus has a few issues from the Evening Post of 1711 and the London Evening Post from 1761.

22 There was an earlier Evening Post, 2 issues of which survive in the Burney Collection, and called The Evening Post With the Historical Account &c., numb 3 (29 August 1706) and number 5 (3 September 1706). 23 For the dates cf. the notes in the Burney Collection. Watson (1971) had suggested an earlier date.

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Other papers published in the first three decades of the 18th century included The New State of Europe, Both as to publick Transactions and Learning (1701/1702), the tri-weekly St. James’s Post, with the best Occurrences Foreign and Domestick (1715-1722), many weekly journals, including The Weekly Packet, with the Price Courant (1714-1721), The Weekly Journal, or, British Gazetteer (1715-1730), continued as Read’s Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, which merged in 1761 with the London Spy, then The Weekly Journal; or: Saturday’s Post. With Fresh Advices Foreign and Domestick, which was the first of a series of papers by Nathaniel Mist (Black 2001: 30),24 succeeded by Mist’s Weekly Journal (1725-1728), continued as Fog’s Weekly Journal (1728-1738), as well as The London Journal, (1720-1735), The British Journal (1720-1728), The Freeholder’s Journal (1722-1723), and Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal (1720-1736). The ZEN Corpus includes four of these journals: The New State of Europe (1701), Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal (1721), The Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (1721), and Read’s Weekly Journal (1731). 2.2.2. Provincial newspapers Whether or not to include in a representative newspaper corpus the provincial papers which sprang up at the beginning of the 18th century must be left open. So far they have not been included, but their history is well described in the relevant histories. Clarke (2010:124) following Black (1987: 14) finds that “it is almost certain that the first provincial paper was the Norwich Post, which was probably founded in 1701” (cf. also Black 2001: 9, 88). The Worcester Postman (1708), however, may have started even before the turn of the century. Clark (1981: 2) argues that “traditionally, the claim to be the first provincial weekly newspaper rests with the Worcester Postman which was launched in 1690 though it was not published regularly until 1709”. In 1709 the Worcester Journal was another paper from Worcester. Between 1710 and 1720 we find quite a number of regional papers published either weekly or twice a week. A list25 of provincial papers during the first 30 years of the 18th century ordered by place of publication includes towns with a whole series of papers, like Bristol (from 1702), Exeter (1711), Manchester (1719), Newcastle (1710), Northampton (1720), Norwich (1701), Nottingham (1710), Worcester (1709), and York (1719), and many others with one or 24 25

Black (2001: 29-38) gives a succinct overview of Mist’s papers. Based on Watson (1971).

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61

two titles only: Bury St. Edmunds (1718), Canterbury (1717), Chester (1721), Cirencester (1718), Derby (1720), Gloucester (1722), Ipswich (1720), Leeds (1718), Lincoln (1728), Liverpool (1712), Ludlow (1719), Maidstone (1725), Oxford (1718), Plymouth (1718), Reading (1723), St. Ives (1717), Salisbury (1715), Shrewsbury (1706), Stamford (1710), Taunton (1725), and Yarmouth (1707). After 1730 we can add Birmingham (1732), Coventry (1741), Hull (1739), Kendal (1731), Leicester (1753), Lewes (1746), Sherborne (1737), Whitehaven (1736), and Yeovil (1744). A reason for including provincial newspapers would be if one expects their language to be different from that of the London papers. Foreign news was, however, mostly taken in and copied from the London papers. This would make local news and advertisements an interesting area of study. Whereas one can compile a representative corpus of London papers without serious gaps from the Burney Collection, this may be more difficult with provincial newspapers. The Burney Collection holds, for example, the Norwich Gazette (1712, 1741-42) and the Gloucester Journal (1727-1789), but not the Worcester Postman or the Worcester Journal, and only few of the other local papers. The ZEN Corpus includes all the important newspapers—besides the London Gazette, these are the tri-weeklies for the three decades, the Daily Courant for 1711, and two weeklies for 1721. Year

Title

1701

LGZ EPT FPT LPT PBY PMN NSE

The London Gazette The English Post The Flying Post The London Post The Post Boy The Post Man New State of Europe Total

No. of issues 13 11 8 8 5 13 3 61

1711

LGZ EVP FPT PBY PMN DCT

The London Gazette The Evening Post The Flying Post The Post Boy The Post Man The Daily Courant Total

13 6 11 1 4 7 42

Number of words 40,385 26,898 22,188 23,167 12,891 35,537 10,948 172,014 33,732 17,342 18,196 4,787 13,843 22,155 110,055

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62 1721

LGZ FPT PBY PBM APB WJL

The London Gazette The Flying Post The Post Boy The Post Man Applebee’s The Weekly Journal Total

15 6 6 3 2 3 35

33,430 13,175 22,476 7,957 15,061 23,094 115,193

Table 2.2: Number of issues and words of newspapers in the ZEN Corpus for the years 1701 to 1721 2.2.3. Newspapers in Scotland and Ireland In the same period, newspapers started to appear in Scotland as well. They were published either twice or three times a week. The Edinburgh Evening Courant (1718) is said “to have been the first Scots newspaper that adopted the system of giving news direct from the countries wherein they occurred, and independent of the London journals. It consisted of three folio half sheets in double columns” (Timperley 1839: 617). Many newspapers followed each other in Edinburgh, and it may be well worth including them in a more comprehensive corpus: The Edinburgh Gazette, or Scotch Postman […] (1680), The Weekly Journal from London (1688), The Orange Gazette (1689), The Edinburgh Gazette (1699-1707), continued as Edinburgh Gazzetteer (1708), continued as Scots Postman: or the New Edinburgh Gazette (1708-1710), continued as New Edinburgh Gazette (1710), continued as Evening Post: or the New Edinburgh Gazette (1710-1712), continued as Scots Postman: or The Edinburgh Gazette (1710-1712), continued as Edinburgh Gazette: or Scots Postman (1714-1715). The Edinburgh Courant (1705), continued as The Scots Courant (1710-1720), The Edinburgh Flying Post (1707), The Edinburgh Evening Courant (1718), The Caledonian Mercury (1720), The Edinburgh News-Letter (1722). There were also a few papers in Glasgow: The Glasgow Courant (1715) continued as West Country Intelligence (1715-1716), and The Glasgow Journal (1729). Among the Irish papers in the Burney Collection there are the Dublin Gazette (1708-1797), and the Dublin Journal (1745). What has been said above for provincial newspapers also holds true for the papers in Scotland and Ireland.

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63

2.3. The eighteenth century (2): 1730 – 1765. From the Daily Advertiser to the London Chronicle. On 3 February 1731 the first issue of the Daily Advertiser was published. Contrary to what its name may imply it did not only publish advertisements, but included a news section just as the other papers did. It was, however, the first paper “to rest its finances successfully on advertisements” (Handover 1965: 54). Other papers of a similar kind followed in the second half of the 18th century. The Daily Advertiser appeared until 9 September 1798.26 The first issue of The London Daily Post, and General Advertiser appeared on 4 November 173427 and ran for about 10 years, the last issue in the Burney Collection is from 10 March 1744. It was succeeded by the General Advertiser on 12 March 1744, which appeared until 1752.28 It published news on the front page, but had advertisements on pages 2 to 4. It was followed by the Public Advertiser from 1 December 1752 to the end of 1792.29 In 1735, both the Daily Courant and the London Journal stopped publication, and were succeeded by the Daily Gazetteer, which first came out on 30 June 1735. In 1746 it changed its name to Daily Gazetteer and London Advertiser. Among the new tri-weeklies there was The Champion or, the Evening Advertiser, of which the Burney Collection has 125 issues between 1740 and 1743.30 All Alive and Merry; or, the London Daily Post appeared as a daily paper between 1740 and 1743. As a new feature of the 1840s it had on its front page an instalment of a book. In 1743 this was a book called Necessity has no Law, a history of England, Scotland and Wales. The London Courant, with many variant titles, appeared between 1745 and 1783. Among the weekly newspapers we find Common Sense or the Englishman’s Journal, of which the Burney Collection has 275 issues between 1737 and 1743. It includes foreign news, country news, and advertisements. The British Spy: or; New Universal London Weekly Journal also published a history of England in instalments around 175l. Old England: or, the National Gazette appeared between 1751 and 1753.31 There were new evening papers appearing three times a week, still on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Among them was the General 26

In the ZEN Corpus: 1731. In the ZEN Corpus: 1741. 28 In the ZEN Corpus: 1751. 29 In the ZEN Corpus: 1791. 30 In the ZEN Corpus: 2 issues of 1741. 31 In the ZEN Corpus: 1751. 27

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Evening Post, which started publication on 2 October 1733. It was one of the long-lasting papers, which ran well into the 19th century.32 It ceased publication as late as 1822. In 1757 two more evening tri-weeklies began to be published. On 1 January 1757 The London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post began publication and half a year later, on 22 July 1757, Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle, taking its name from Lloyd’s Coffee House, began to be published. The former, shortening its title to London Chronicle in 1765,33 lasted until 1823, and the latter, also shortening its title two years earlier to Lloyd’s Evening Post lasted until 1804.34 Finally, the St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post succeeded the St. James’s Evening Post in 1761 and lasted until 1822. The period after 1730 was also the period of new journals. The GrubStreet-Journal appeared between 1730 and 1737. At the same time a monthly magazine called The Gentleman’s Magazine: Or, Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer appeared for the first time, its first issue for January 1731. Each issue consisted of 48 pages. The ZEN Corpus for 1731 to 1761 continues to include the London Gazette. Apart from this publication, between 1731 and 1741 there are mainly daily papers and weeklies, for 1751 there are two advertisers in the corpus, and for 1761 there is a miscellany of different types of newspapers. Year

Title

No. of issues

No. of words

1731

LGZ DAT DCT DJL DPT CJL RWJ

The London Gazette Daily Advertiser The Daily Courant The Daily Journal The Daily Post Country Journal Read’s Weekly J. Total

6 6 3 4 4 2 3 28

11,623 21,981 13,450 19,073 22,738 23,065 20,540 132,470

1741

LGZ DPT LDP CEA CJL

The London Gazette The Daily Post London Daily Post The Champion Country Journal Total

8 7 8 2 1 26

23,749 30,840 42,326 14,502 11,918 123,335

32

In the ZEN Corpus: 1771. In the ZEN Corpus: 1761, 1781, and 1791. 34 In the ZEN Corpus: 1761 and 1781. 33

Newspapers from 1665 to 1765

65

1751

LGZ GAT LDA LMP OEN OLE

The London Gazette General Advertiser London Daily Adv. L Morning Penny P. Old England N. G. Old England Total

6 5 5 5 2 3 26

22,394 49,693 39,037 23,648 20,014 29,738 184,524

1761

LGZ LCR LEP PUL RWJ

The London Gazette London Chronicle Lloyd’s Even. Post The Public Ledger Read’s W. Journal Total

4 2 4 3 2 15

24,043 22,932 43,280 34,485 18,622 143,362

Table 2.3: Number of issues and words of newspapers in the ZEN Corpus for the years 1731 to 1761

2.4. Summary: Number of newspapers The number of newspapers printed between 1671 and 1761 and available for study is difficult to ascertain and is of no consequence for the establishment of a corpus. It very much depends on what search criteria one uses. Between 1679 and 1682 alone, in a span of three years, there were about 40 different titles,35 most of which one would, however, not want to include in a corpus covering more than a hundred years. A list of newspapers put together after the Stamp Act of 1712 shows that there were 12 daily and weekly papers in London which were stamped (Snyder 1967: 344, also repeated in Görlach 2001: 207). They were The London Gazette, the tri-weekly morning papers The Post-Man, The PostBoy and The Flying Post, one daily paper The Daily Courant, the two evening papers The Evening Post and The Night-Post, and five weeklies The Examiner, The Britain, The Weekly Packet, Daniel Defoe’s Review36 and Dawke’s Letter.

35 See footnotes 15 and 16 above. Figures are based on Watson (1971: col. 131617) and Nelson et al. (1987). The latter is indispensable, as it lists each individual issue of all papers published between 1641 and 1700, both alphabetically and chronologically. 36 Originally called A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France it appeared under various names between 1704 and 1713. First published as a weekly paper, it soon appeared twice weekly and later as a tri-weekly.

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Claridge (2010: 600) based on Studer (2008: 18) based on Jones (1996: 23) claims that between 1665 and 1800 “a total of 88 newspapers are attested”.

3. The function of newspapers: Topics covered by the papers of the period Introduction There is a clear development from newspapers whose primary function was to convey (foreign) news to its readers, to newspapers which saw the transmission of advertisements, announcements, letters, essays, book instalments, etc. as one of their main goals.37 It is an often repeated commonplace that the news printed in the London Gazette—and in the later tri-weeklies—was primarily foreign news. Home news, in comparison, is said to have been meagre: it included some shipping news, a few reports of crime and—occasionally—trials, some reports of accidents, enumerations of births, weddings, and deaths, figures of the stock-market, of lotteries, and a series of long lists of newly elected members of Parliament or judiciary judges, and the like. Almost from their beginning, newspapers also carried advertisements and announcements. In linguistic terms these sections of a newspaper correspond to different text classes, or in another terminology, to genres, sub-genres, or (traditional) text types. The distinction into different text classes (the term used in this chapter) is important both for the history of English newspapers and for linguistic analyses, which should take care to study the language of corresponding text classes, and not, to use an example of present day newspapers, compare the language of political reportage with the language used in the sports pages. Incidentally, in the period investigated here, there were no reports on sports.

3.1. Text classes In preparing a corpus, one of the first decisions compilers of newspaper corpora must take is what to include and what to exclude from their corpora. This decision will very much depend on the purpose of the corpus. Linguists and historians will be interested in different matters. But 37 There are also functions within a text. Claridge (2009: 99) lists besides information: intensification, evaluation, and explanation/clarification.

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even within linguistics there will be text classes of differing importance. The ZEN Corpus was primarily devised for text linguistic and syntactic studies of newspapers, for which long lists of names were of little significance. Therefore the many long lists, e.g, those of the meetings of assizes, of sheriffs or of preachers, or lists of persons deceased in the course of a year, were excluded, but these exclusions were duly marked and the texts can be retrieved by looking at the corresponding facsimile page images. Texts consisting almost exclusively of figures have also been excluded. Lists of stocks and exchange and other financial information, and the details of the various lotteries were also not included. Perhaps a more problematic decision was to exclude poems, on the assumption their inclusion may distort the analysis of newspaper language.38 In some of the existing corpora advertisements are included, whereas in others they are excluded. In the compilation of the ZEN Corpus advertisements were included, mainly for the reason that they are also part of the language a reader of the period came across when reading a newspaper. If one excludes advertisements, one must also exclude announcements, which are often indistinguishable from advertisements. And there are, in the 18th century, other text classes that are not news proper: royal proclamations, official announcements, addresses, letters, and essays. The newspapers between 1665 and 1765 carry these texts in differing degrees and it should be possible to use them for establishing newspaper profiles. Before giving the relevant figures, we will look at some of these text classes in more detail. 3.1.1. Foreign news and home news Providing news was the primary function of early newspapers. The London Gazette of 1666, in its first full year of existence, in 102 issues39 from number 15 to number 118, used on average 98.3% of its space for news.40 The remaining 1.7% was devoted to advertisements, announcements, and declarations. 72 of the 102 issues carried news only. By 1671, now based on the ZEN Corpus, the number of words in the news sections was still 96% of all the words for that year.41 This number decreased 38

Details and examples are given in Fries (2001). Issue no. 61 is not available in the London Gazette online. 40 The calculation is based on the online version of the London Gazette. 41 The percentages from the ZEN Corpus cannot be directly compared to the figures of 1666 and 1667 because lists of names etc. (compare above) are omitted in the ZEN Corpus. 39

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constantly, in 1701 there were 62%, in 1711 46%, ten years later 30% news, and by 1761 the figure comes down to 12%: the London Gazette was not a typical newspaper anymore. The group of newspapers around 1700 all show similar results, more than 50% of their words appear in the news sections, ten years later, in 1711, a tendency sets in to slowly reduce the proportion of news in favour of advertisements, but even the Daily Advertiser of 1731 has more news than advertisements, and by 1761, the London Chronicle and Lloyd’s Evening Post had 44 % news. Title EPT FPT PMN LPT PBY DCT EVP APB RWJ DJL DAT LDA LMP LCR LEP CEA

Full Title English Post Flying Post Post Man London Post Post Boy Daily Courant Evening Post Applebee’s Read’s Weekly Journal Daily Journal Daily Advertiser London Daily Advertiser London Morning Penny Post London Chronicle Lloyd’s Evening Post Champion English Advertiser

1701 74 65 64 61 60

1711

1721

64 48

70 42

5042 3743

36

1731

1761

65 76 63 65

64

51 77 26 77 44 44 54

Table 2.4: Percentage of words in the news sections between 1701 and 1761. The term “foreign news” was not used in early newspapers, nor did the term “home news” occur. Until around 1730 foreign news came first, on the front page of virtually all newspapers. Occasionally a report about ship movements (SHIPPING NEWS, see below) came in-between foreign news, or 42

The ZEN Corpus includes only part of one issue. The figure must be just below 50%. 43 The low figure is due to the new text class of essays.

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even ahead of it. Changes came from the weekly papers and the new advertisers. The first number of the Daily Advertiser consisted of advertisements only, but later numbers had foreign news and home news before the advertisements, taking up half a page or even more. In some of the late papers home news came before foreign news. Home news, in the definition used by the ZEN Corpus, is all the news from London and the counties of England. Sutherland (1986) distinguishes between London news and Country news. London news normally came first in the papers. In the 17th century country news depended on the arrival of the mail “at the London letter office three days a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday” (Sutherland 1986: 91). In order to facilitate comparisons and catch traits of linguistic development, the ZEN Corpus established separate text classes for shipping news, accidents, crime, birth and death notices, although they are strictly speaking overwhelmingly also home news. What remained was classified as HOME NEWS. The major topic of these remaining domestic news was news about the movements of royalty (court news). The newspapers also included long lists of circuit judges and sheriffs, of newly elected members of parliament, and tables with figures, especially lottery results. All these were excluded in the compilation of the ZEN Corpus.44 3.1.2. Shipping news Shipping news, sent in from the major English ports, was a common feature in almost all the newspapers of the period. It gives the reader information about a ship’s arrival, its departure or presence in a particular port and, often, the name of its captain; it mentions when a ship passes by or remains in a port, some of the items are more detailed, adding information about a ship’s destination, or listing the goods it carried. Shipping news starts out as a regular news item. Therefore, in the 17th century, it lacks any specific headline, but begins just as all the other news items with a place- and dateline. In the 18th century, however, it was among the first items to be separated by a headline of its own, which may have been SHIP NEWS, PORT NEWS, or HOME PORTS. Items without a headline continue to occur throughout the whole period. In the 18th century these texts become more stereotyped, full of abbreviations and elliptical constructions.

44 These lists, though they may be of interest to newspaper historians, are clearly of less interest to linguists studying continuous texts.

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Although important news items, shipping news took up a tiny proportion of the news. In the ZEN Corpus, there are 878 instances of shipping news.45 These include a relatively small number of items in the 17th century. The London Gazette of 1671 has 4.8% shipping news, but afterwards the figures go down to less than 1%. The largest number of shipping news items can be found between 1731 and 1761, table 2.5 shows the figures for some papers during this period. Title DAT DCT DJL RWJ DPT CEA GAT LDA LMP LCR LEP PUL

Full Title Daily Advertiser Daily Courant Daily Journal Read’s Weekly Journal Daily Post Champion English Advertiser General Advertiser London Daily Advertiser London Morning Penny Post London Chronicle Lloyd’s Evening Post Public Ledger

1731 5.4 7.4 8.0 8.8

1741

1751

1761

10.2 8.3 5.4 9.7 6.2 8.5 13.3 9.1 10.7

Table 2.5: Percentage of words in shipping news against all news (foreign and home news) Shipping news with its restricted vocabulary and similar sentence structures, provides a good example for studying the linguistic development of a specific text class over a longer period of time. 3.1.3. Accidents and crime The ZEN Corpus distinguishes two related text classes, ACCIDENTS and The London Gazette started out with less than 3% in 1671, the newspapers around 1700 have 5 to 7% news in this category, while a significant proportion of accident and crime reports occurs in some papers between 1731 and 1751.46 CRIME.

45

A detailed description is given in Fries (2008). A survey of accident reports is given in Fries (2012), of crime reports in Fries (2009). 46

Newspapers from 1665 to 1765 Title DAT DPT LDP GAT LDA LMP OEN OLE

Full Title Daily Advertiser Daily Post London Daily Post General Advertiser London Daily Advertiser London Morning Penny Post Old England or the National Gazette Old England

1731 16.46

71 1741

1751

17.89 21.23 28.48 16.15 36.54 26.99 21.02

Table 2.6: Percentage of the text classes ACCIDENT and CRIME between 1731 and 1751 against all news items For the text class CRIME Fries (2009) distinguishes between borderline cases and crime reports proper. The former include texts that “look like official, legal announcements or advertisements” (Fries 2009: 15), e.g. when a horse is stolen and some reward is announced for its return. The latter include reports of thefts, robberies, and murders. In the ZEN Corpus, the text class CRIME also includes reports about imprisonment, the court and penalties. The text class ACCIDENT includes reports on fires, thunderstorms, falls of all kinds (from a window, or into the water with subsequent drowning), and accidents happening on the road. The largest number of these texts occur in the second half of the 18th century (Fries 2012). With regard to hard and soft news, crime and accident reports can belong to both hard news, i.e. short factual reports whose main function is to inform the reader, and soft news, i.e. longer reports that may also entertain—or rather frighten or excite their readership. The relative proportion will influence the characterization of a newspaper. 3.1.4. The Weekly Bill of Deaths and death notices The weekly bills of deaths published during the Great Plague, often mentioned in references to the contents of the London Gazette, are a good example of a stereotype sentence. As the ZEN Corpus sets in only after the plague had abated, these sentences do not occur in the Corpus, but they are a regular feature in the London Gazette of 1666. From its beginning in November 1665 to the end of 1666, there were 116 such notices. They were clear text-end signals, i.e. they were the last news item on the back page, often, but not always, set off by a small empty space from the preceding news and formulated in a stereotyped way.

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The shortest and the longest version were 1) The London Bill for this Week runs thus. Total 445. Plague 243. Decrease 14. (LGZ 9, 11/12/1665, p.2) 2) The Account of the Bill of Mortality runs thus. Buried of all Diseases 247. Whereof of the Plague 7. Increased in the whole 12. Decreased of the Plague 1. (LGZ 108, 26/11/1666, p.2)

The earliest death notices in the ZEN Corpus are from the London Gazette of 1671. 3) The sixth instant died here, Jacques Charles Amelot, First President of the Court of Aydes, in the Thirty seventh year of his age, much lamented for his great Parts and Abilities, which he had given long testimony of in the discharge of that place. (1671lgz00537:17.1) 4) The Conde de Castriglio, after having long languished, under a lingering desease, died here this week generally lamented for his great worth and merits. (1671lgz00540:11.1)

The proto-typical death notice consists, as in (3) and (4), of just one sentence, which begins either with the temporal element or with the name of the deceased person at the beginning. A third way would be a reference to the source of the report,47 as in (5): 5) They write from Cambridge, that last week died there Rev. Mr. Lowcook, Fellow of Trinity College. (1741dpt06907:46.1)

Death notices are often preceded by a header, Dead, Deaths, or Died, but the text class does not need any header. The individual items can also be embedded in other news. In the middle of the 18th century, newspapers began to publish lists of the names of deceased persons. (6) is an example giving time, place, name, and, in one case, the circumstances of a person’s death. 6) Died. A few days ago, at Erme, in Cornwall, the Rev. William Stackhouse, D. D. rector of that parish. A few days since, at Bristol, Mr. Clemens Patterson, late an apothecary in Hounsditch. Tuesday, in Nassau-street, Soho, Mrs. 47 In the ZEN Corpus there are 237 instances with the date first, 37 with the name first, and 20 with the source first. (Fries 2006a: 168).

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Craufurd, relict of Lieut. Col. Craufurd. Wednesday, at West Horsley, in Surry, aged near 80, John Paston, Esq. The same day, at Hertford, by a fall from his horse, in returning from Harlow Bush fair, Mr. Pym, maltster. Thursday, in Bloomsbury-square, Mrs. Kirkman. The same day, at Isleworth, the Rev. John Huckle. The same day, in Tooley-street, Mr. Hosea Miller, timber-merchant. Yesterday, in Clarges-street, Piccadilly, John Miller, Esq; (1771bug00068: 53.1)

Whereas died is the normal verb, persons of high rank, e.g. King William III, in 1701, departed this life.48 7) On the 8th Instant, about 8 a Clock in the Morning, King William III of ever blessed Memory, departed this Life at his Palace of Kensington, after a Fortnight’s Indisposition. (1701fpt01067:2.1)

Summing up, the text class has a very simple sentence structure and a very restricted vocabulary, but as an early version of a text class that is widely used in modern newspapers and as a forerunner of obituaries, which begin to appear towards the end of the 18th century they are of importance.49 3.1.5. Announcements and advertisements Announcements and advertisements, though not often discussed in studies of newspaper language,50 are an integral and important part of early newspapers with an interesting history of their own. Medical advertisements, their style and the use of adjectives, were first discussed in Fries (1997b), which was followed by a book-length study by auf dem Keller (2004), who looked at both medical and book advertisements. Advertisements in the form of letters occur in the ZEN Corpus from 1751 onwards (Fries 2002), late eighteenth-century want ads are discussed in Wright (2009). This section looks at the beginning of advertisements and announcements in the early issues of the London Gazette, and connects the findings to the ZEN Corpus. To begin with, in 17th-century newspapers it is not always easy to separate advertisements from the news sections. In the early issues of both the Oxford and the London Gazette there were no advertisements at all. 48

In the whole ZEN Corpus the phrase “departed this life” occurs only 15 times. For a concise description of death notices cf. Fries (2006a) and for the period from 1785 onwards Fries (1990). 50 The Rostock Newspaper Corpus does not include advertisements at all. 49

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There were, however, some legal notices separated from the news text by a thin line. The first notice of this kind appeared in no. 30 of the London Gazette, on February 11, 1666, and was repeated in slightly different words in the following issue. 8) These are to give notice unto all Persons owing any Rent or Summs [sic] of Money for Wine Licenses, that if they do not forthwith pay the same unto His Royal Highness Commissioners, for granting Wine Licenses sitting in Durham-yard London, Process will issue out of the Exchequer against them for the same, which all Persons concerned are to take notice of, that they may avoid the charge and trouble which otherwise will ensue. (LGZ 30, 22.2.1666, p.1)

It can be argued that this type of text was not part of the reportage of news (neither foreign nor home news) but was given to the paper for publication by someone from the outside. Similar texts were to appear in the weeks to follow, but there were many issues of the London Gazette without any notices or announcements at all. The first time the word advertisement appears as a header is in numbers 42 and 45 from April 1666. In both instances it is the same text inserted in the second column of the front page and separated again from the news by a thin black line: “An Advertisement from the Hearth-Office in London.” What follows is not an advertisement in the modern sense of the word, but, using the formulation of the OED (sub advertisement), “a public notice or announcement”. 9) An Advertisement from the Hearth-Office in London. The Farmers of His Majesties Revenues of the Hearth-Duty, intending to Sub-Farm several Counties and places of this Kingdom, Have thought fit hereby to give notice, That on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, in every week, they will be ready as the Cheif [sic] Hearth-Office in London, to receive all such Proposals as shall be made to them on that behalf: And they desire all persons who shall present any such Proposal, that they will themselves sign the same, and therein insert the places of their Residence. And that where they propose for several Counties or places, they will particularly distinguish what sum they intend for each place or County apart. And all Persons who are concerned, either in the receiving or paying the half years duty, from Michaelmas unto Lady-day last, are to take notice that the said half years duty is to be collected by Officers to be appointed by the said Farmers, and that they ought to pay the same to no other hand. By appointment of the said Farmers, SAM: HARTLIB, Secretary. (LGZ 42, 5/4/1666, p.1)

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Out of the 103 issues (including the early issues of the Oxford Gazette) of 1666, announcements of this type appeared in 31 issues, the longest taking up 15% of the issue. On average, the space reserved for announcements during the first year of its existence, was restricted to a meagre 1.5%. For a linguistic analysis, I propose to distinguish between announcements or legal notices on the one hand, and advertisements proper on the other hand. The text in (9) above would be classified as an announcement in spite of its headline suggesting that it was an advertisement. In no. 62, June 14, 1666, the London Gazette published “An Advertisement”, explicitly stating that it did not publish advertisements: 10) An Advertisement. Being daily prest to the Publication of Books, Medicines, and other things, not properly the business of a Paper of Intelligence. This is to notifie once for all, that we will not charge the Gazette with Advertisements, unless they be matter of State; but that a Paper of Advertisements will be forthwith Printed apart, and recommended to the Publick by another hand. (LGZ 62, 14/6/166, p.2)

To conclude, there were five ways to mark a text as an announcement or as an advertisement: 1) Separation by a line above and below the announcement 2) A dateline in the middle of the column 3) A headline “Advertisement”, which was the only headline ever used in early newspapers 4) The use of italics for the text and normal print for proper names 5) A bigger initial capital letter extending over two lines The first marker was soon given up, the second occurred only very occasionally, the third one was common during the first years of the London Gazette, the use of italics and bigger initial capitals remained very common. From the middle of the second year of the London Gazette a sixth–indirect–marker for announcements and advertisements established itself. These texts are printed at the end of the paper, at the bottom of the second column of page two thus functioning as text-end signals. There are borderline cases between notices and advertisements, e.g. the inclusion of texts about run-away or stolen horses. The first text about such a horse appeared in issue no. 132, of 18 February 1667:

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11) A Fay brown Horse, 14 handfuls high, meal-mouthed, a feather or two under his Main, one white foot, one little white Star in his Head, scarce seven years old, taken out of the Muse on Thursday night: Wherefore all persons are to take notice hereof, and if they hear of, or finde such an Horse, to give notice to any of his Majesties servants in the Muse, and they shall be well rewarded. (LGZ 132, 18/2/1667, p.2)

Advertisements of newly published books begin to appear in June 1667: 12)

There is lately publish’d A Deduction, wherein is proved by most clear Arguments, That the Right of devolution hath no place among Soveraign Princes of the Low Countries, as some have gone about to persuade: and that the delay of paying the French Queen’s Dowry doth not annull the Renunciation which she made at her Marriage. (LGZ 163, 6/6/1667, p.2)

A week later the second advertisement of a newly published book goes under the appropriate headline: 13)

An Advertisement. There is newly published, An Exact Collection of all the STATUTES at large, now in Force; from the Year 1640, to the present time. Printed in a fair Character, by His Majesties Printers; and to be sold by the Booksellers of Fleetstreet and Holborn. (LGZ 170, 1/7/1667, p.2)

The next step in the evolution of the text class ANNOUNCEMENT are texts introduced by the phrases We are ordered to give notice (LGZ 130, 11/2/1666, p.2, LGZ 137, 7/3/1666, p.2), These are to give notice (136, 4/3/1666, p.2), I am desired to publish this Advice (LGZ 135, 28/2/1666, p.2), We are ordered to publish this Advice (LGZ 145, 4/4/1667, p.2), We are also to give Notice (LGZ 148, 15/4/1666, p.2), and We are desired to give Notice (LGZ 206, 4 /11/1667). What we find in issues of the London Gazette from March 1666 onwards, is one or two texts per paper, set in italics, which are legal notices of bankruptcy, or even the opposite, someone surprisingly regaining his money and paying back his debtors (LGZ 135, 28/2/1666, p.2), all of them beginning with the legal phrase Whereas. The number of announcements and advertisements in the London Gazette rose from 4% in 1671 to 20% in 1701. At this time it did not differ essentially from the tri-weeklies of the period, which had between 26% and 35% announcements and advertisements, whereas the Daily Courant, with 54% had clearly more of them. The figures for 1711 show a strong

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increase of this text class in the London Gazette at the cost of the news sections. Title LGZ EPT FPT LPT PBY PMN NSE DCT EVP APB

Full Title London Gazette English Post Flying Post London Post Post Boy Post Man New State of Europe Daily Courant Evening Post Applebee’s

1671 4

1681 22

1691 19

1701 20

1711 46

26 34 38 34 35 23

1721 68

27

40

45

22 20

54 24

18 23

Table 2.7: Percentage of announcements and advertisements between 1671 and 1721 (including LOST AND FOUND). For the period 1731 to 1761 we see the importance of advertisements for all newspapers. Surprisingly, the Daily Advertiser has a very low percentage for an advertiser. The prototypical case shows a percentage of over 50% announcements and advertisements. Title LGZ CJL DAT DJL DPT RWJ CEA LDP GAT LDA OEN OLE PUL

Full Title London Gazette Country Journal Daily Advertiser Daily Journal Daily Post Read’s Weekly Journal Champion English Advertiser London Daily Post General Advertiser London Daily Advertiser Old England or the National Gazette Old England Public Ledger

1731 85 59 22 61 75

1741 55 59

1751 60

46 56 45 77 75

1761 83

32

61 54 54 57

Table 2.8: Percentage of announcements and advertisements between 1731 and 1761 (including LOST AND FOUND).

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3.1.6. Proclamations and addresses Royal Proclamations were occasionally printed in the London Gazette. They are, however, not a frequent text class: in the 96 issues of the London Gazette contained in the ZEN Corpus there are only 7 proclamations, taking up between 1 and 11% of the space of the respective issue. Proclamations were not normally printed in the other newspapers. The only other instance in the ZEN Corpus of a proclamation occurs in the three issues of the Public Ledger of 1761, but the Public Ledger was a paper full of announcements and advertisements. 14) GEORGE R. Whereas our Trusty and Well-beloved William Faden hath humbly represented unto Us, that he hath, at great Expence, engaged several Gentlemen to Write and Compile, The PUBLIC LEDGER, which the Petitioner most humbly apprehends will be of great Use to all Our Subjects, and specially to those who are any Ways concerned in Trade and Commerce. We do by these Presents, grant unto him, the said William Faden, Our Licence for the sole Printing, Publishing, and Vending the said Work, strictly forbidding all Our Subjects to reprint, abridge, or publish the same, as they will answer the contrary at their Perils. Given at our Court at St. James’s, the Seventeenth Day of December, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Nine, In the Thirty Third Year of our Reign. By his Majesty’s Command, W. PITT. (1761pul00334:261.1)

The situation with addresses is similar. An address was a text that was aimed at the king, “a formal approach to a sovereign, esp. a request, appeal, or statement of grievance; a petition; a statement arguing for or supporting something” (OED sub address). In the ZEN Corpus the London Gazette has several of such addresses in 1681, 1701, 1731, and 1761. The largest number was found for 1681: there are 10 issues for that year of the London Gazette, 6 of which carry altogether 15 addresses, making up 30% of the space available (counted in words). In issue no. 1627 of 20 June 1681 there were as many as 8 addresses, the number of pages for this one issue was extended to four pages. Other newspapers hardly ever printed addresses. In the ZEN Corpus, there are two instances in the Postman of 1711 (no. 2070) and the occasional one in the London Chronicle and in Lloyd’s Evening Post, both of 1761. The text class can be easily retrieved from the ZEN Corpus by looking for the text class ADDRESS, the individual items by entering the stereotypical introductory phrase: the following address, this following address, and by the collocation humble address.

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3.1.7. Letters and essays The ZEN Corpus distinguishes between the text classes LETTER and This distinction can lead to misunderstandings. ‘Letter’ can be seen as a formal category, which refers to texts beginning with a dateline and the address Sir, and a final line with a farewell formula and the sender’s name. The term essay, on the other hand, refers to the contents of a text: “a composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a subject;” (OED sub essay). These texts may be presented in the form of letters. Some of the essays in the ZEN Corpus are classified as letters, which leads to a slightly larger number of letters: there are 43 letters and 36 essays in the ZEN Corpus. This figure is fairly small and one may well ask whether one should include these texts in a newspaper corpus. However, one must not overlook that they are a typical feature of the weekly press, and that they are of considerable length in the papers that published them. The original idea for establishing a text class LETTER in the ZEN Corpus was to separate letters from all other newspaper texts as personal statements by individual authors that were not produced by the editor or publisher. There are several types of letters that need to be distinguished. Much of the news printed in the newspapers was submitted to the editors in the form of letters, and this is often stated in the form We have received letters from with the news following.51 These are not counted as letters in the ZEN Corpus. Letters of persons of various ranks could be reprinted in full or in parts by a newspaper, thus reflecting the language of the author. There may be very official letters, e.g. by a King or a Queen addressing their subjects. The first letters begin to be printed in 1701. The London Post, no. 264, prints a letter from the King of Spain to the “Queen his Aunt”, and the Post Man of March 1702 has a letter of Queen Anne to the French King. In 1711, there is just one letter in then ZEN Corpus, the Flying Post copies a letter of the Queen to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In 1741 an exchange of letters is printed in the Daily Post, between Major General Baron de Ginckel, Envoy Extraordinary from the States General to the King of Prussia and the Prussian King (1741dpt06807:23). A second group consists of letters to the editor52 of a newspaper, of which there are two types: the essays, mentioned above, in the form of a letter and ‘genuine’ letters as precursors of modern letters to the editor. ESSAY.

51

References to letters are discussed by Fries (2002). On modern letters to the editor, public and private communication, cf. Landert and Jucker (2010). 52

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They cannot always be kept strictly apart, but the latter are typically shorter and are signed with a real name, whereas the former are often extremely long and are often signed with a pseudonym.53 Studer (2008: 172), who did not look at the earlier years in the ZEN Corpus, finds that letters to the editor had emerged in English newspapers by 1741. In the ZEN Corpus, throughout the whole period there are not any letters in the issues of the London Gazette, the papers of the early 18th century (1701 and 1711) also lack any letters to the editor. The situation has changed by 1721: there are 8 letters, one in the Post Boy, two in the Post Man, and five in the Weekly Journal. The one in the Post Boy is a short reply to a letter in the Weekly Journal. Unfortunately, the latter is not in the ZEN Corpus, which is an argument for including different newspapers from the same part of the year in a corpus. The letter in the Post Boy is a “genuine” letter of someone who feels he was misrepresented by the Weekly Journal. In the Post Man of 1721, we find two letters of the essay type, one with more than 1,000 words, the other with almost 800 words, but it is not complete: “This Letter shall be concluded in our next” (1721pmn03194: 1.1). We do not know the name of the senders. The Weekly Journal of 11 February 1721 begins with a letter, introduced by Sir with more than 1600 words, and later in the paper there is another one of almost 500 words. Once again, the authors are not identifiable. Another letter is a cover letter for an essay, and the remaining two are ‘genuine’ letters to the editor, both preceded by a dateline, the address Sir, and a final line, giving the authors’ names as initials. For 1731, there are six letters in the corpus, and in the Daily Courant they are a regular feature as the first item in the newspaper. For 1741 there are four of them, one an extremely long one, of more than 3200 words, in the Country Journal, and two shorter ones of about 700 and 900 words in the Daily Post. For 1751 we find six letters, and in 1761 the number of letters abounds, mainly due to the Public Ledger, which printed letters of all types. In the ZEN Corpus essay-like texts are a feature of the New State of Europe of 1701, which printed geographical background stories in the “Geographical Part of the New State of Europe” besides the daily news. In 1711, the Daily Courant (no.3166) printed a “Memorial”. The first essays proper in the ZEN Corpus are in Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal and in the Weekly Journal as their introductory articles on their front page. In 1731, they are regular features in Read’s Weekly Journal, in 1741 the Champion opens with an essay and in 1751 the London Daily Advertiser 53

E.g. Philantropos (General Advertiser 19 November 1751), Solomon Seewell (London Chronicle, 4 April 1761), or Philopatriae (Public Ledger 8 April 1761). A list of pseudonyms is given in Fries (2002: 282).

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and the London Morning Penny Post begin with a travel narrative in instalments. In 1761, all papers in the ZEN Corpus, with the exception of the London Gazette, begin with a narrative of some sort or an essay. Some of them can be characterized as a leading article or editorial, used to influence the readers (cf. Claridge 2010: 605).

3.2. Newspaper profiles Newspaper profiles are useful preliminaries for the study of newspaper language. Most of what has been presented in sections 2 and 3 above can be used for establishing profiles of individual newspapers. This information helps us distinguish, for example, between papers with news only, with news and advertisements, those with different types of announcements, and those with serializations and essays. Other information considered useful for establishing a profile, and referred to by Schneider (2002), includes the frequency of publication, the names of the owners or printers of a newspaper, and its period of existence (for establishing a corpus and for diachronic analyses). This information is provided by most of the histories of early English newspapers, but also for the years collected in the Rostock Newspaper Corpus in the appendix in Schneider (2002), who proposes to distinguish between internal and external criteria. Among ‘internal criteria’ Schneider (2002) lists in particular non-news content. In the ZEN Corpus these sections of newspapers are partly included and partly excluded. Advertisements, announcements, letters and essays, are marked as separate text classes, whereas lists of names, figures, or poetry are excluded. Among the external criteria Schneider (2002: 63-67) lists circulation and price, but one may well ask how these influence the language of newspapers. Studer (2008: 57ff) discusses socio-historical profiles on the basis of previous studies by newspaper historians (he mentions Andrews 1859, Fox Bourne 1887, Morison 1932, and Black 1987) and distinguishes between three organization profiles: high-performance, medium-performance and low-performance profiles. This classification “is based on a simple count of references” (Studer 2008: 64) in the works of the historians mentioned, without, however, a discussion of their reliability within their historical context. Instead of mirroring views of contemporaries and later newspaper historians, a thorough linguistic analysis may become a better basis for newspaper profiles. A discussion of stylistic variables leads Studer (2008: 79-102) to distinguish between no less than six different profiles: conservative,

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conservative-popular, quality, popular, quality-popular, popular quality, and balanced profiles. There are quality and popular variables, both based on the dimensions of content, coherence, and reinforcement. Whereas some of these variables can be easily checked, e.g. those based on the content of a newspaper (percentage of news reports, reports of foreign affairs, of domestic politics, its commercial content advertizing), or the presence of features (essays and letters), other variables, based on ‘coherence’, like the meaningful coverage of hard news (relevance consistency) are open to interpretation. Copying of sections from other newspapers, to take another example, is categorized as a popular variable based on coherence—but the language of such articles is, no doubt, that of a quality paper. On these premises, Studer (2008) manages to establish newspaper profiles for the newspapers of 1701 and 1741 (and 1791): two newspapers of 1701 have a conservative profile (The London Gazette and the English Post), three have a quality profile (the Post Man, the Flying Post, and the New State of Europe), one has a popular profile (the London Post), and one is a quality-popular hybrid (The Post Boy). For 1741, there are no papers with a conservative or quality-popular profile, but two newspapers (the London Daily Post and the Daily Post) are said to have a conservative-popular profile, one (the Country Journal) has a quality and one (the Champion) a popular profile. In order not to base these categories on a few generalized observations, and in order to substantiate or to disprove them, a large series of individual studies will have to be undertaken. Before we have these results, it may be prudent to take one of the established categories as a working tool. Schneider (2002) distinguishes for the 18th and 19th centuries between popular and quality papers, and only for the 20th century, following Jucker (1992), between down-market, mid-market, and up-market newspapers. These distinctions are based on external criteria such as readership composition and readership appeal. Some of the points that may prove useful for distinguishing between quality and popular papers are discussed below (section 4.1). Histories of early newspapers contain much information on the readership of these papers. From the beginning the readership of the Gazette was not the general public but the mercantile classes, the legal profession, municipal officers and officials serving at home and abroad (Handover 1965: 12). The news printed in the tri-weekly papers and the dailies “catered for the man of business” (Clarke 2010: 79). On the other hand, “the news values of the weekly journals were more downmarket, following the trend set by Mist’s and Applebee’s Weekly Journals”

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(Clarke 2010: 79). The essays or the serializations of geographical or historical books introducing the issues of many journals point to an educated readership. Especially in present-day newspapers, news is frequently classified in soft news and hard news. These are two poles on a cline from informationbased news to predominantly entertainment (Schneider 2002: 67-71). Hard news relates to news in politics (both foreign and home politics) and economics, but also to so-called “spot news”—reports about accidents, disasters or crimes, especially when these texts are presented in a neutral, formal or distant style. Soft news, on the other hand, consists of human interest stories often in an involved, personal or colloquial style, but also of reports about natural disasters, crimes and accidents. The concepts are not watertight, and there will always be borderline cases.

4. Areas of newspaper language studies 4.1. Discourse analysis, text linguistics, stylistics The most obvious areas for corpus linguistic studies are those with the largest number of items one can retrieve from the ZEN Corpus. The vocabulary used by an author, in a book, or, in our case, by newspapers could yield many results that can be used for a stylistic interpretation. Fries and Lehmann (2006: 92) suggested that the vocabulary of newspapers might have been less varied than that of contemporary magazines or novels. Lexical diversity or information density (Nevalainen 2002) indicates the degree of variation and repetition in the vocabulary of a text. This is one of the reasons why the ZEN Corpus distinguishes between different text classes. In some of them lexical diversity is expected to be rather low. Lexical diversity is measured by the type-token ratio, for which one should have samples of similar size, though not necessarily very big samples, as the bigger a sample the lower its type-token ratio. A pilot study of the vocabulary of the London Gazette in steps of thirty years from 1671 to 1761 showed that the number of word types for the early years was around 800 per newspaper, for the later years even lower, which mirrored the change of the London Gazette from a paper printing news to a paper printing proclamations and official advertisements (Fries 1997a:

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156-157).54 Fries and Lehmann (2006) experiment with different sizes of sub-corpora of the ZEN Corpus and also compare their results to extracts from the Spectator and to samples from the BNC and the Times of 1999. With a targeted extension of the ZEN Corpus—with respect to the number of individual newspapers and the size of text classes—one could carry out deeper investigations on the basis of the type-token relation and achieve more secure stylistic interpretations to match the impressionistic observations by newspaper historians.55 Another aspect worthy of stylistic analysis to be mentioned here is the use of foreign words and phrases. Individual words, phrases, or whole sentences may be given in French or Latin, and—to a lesser degree—in Hebrew, Greek, Spanish, and Italian. The way individual newspapers use foreign words, especially in news articles of a certain length, gives us an indication of their status as quality papers and the type of readers they cater for. The influx of Latin legal terminology in reports from parliament or from the courtrooms, the use of Latin mottos (Fries 2007:125-128), and quotations from speeches with interspersed Latin phrases and their translations (Fries 2010a) characterize individual newspapers. 4.1.1. Headlines and text beginnings Beginning with Straumann (1935), newspaper headlines are a favourite topic in the study of newspaper language. Most of them, however, deal with the later history of English newspapers, for the simple reason that early newspapers hardly ever use a headline. What comes closest to headlines as a means of structuring the news in the newspapers were place- and datelines.56 They give the name of the origin of a report, i.e. the place from where the report was sent to London, thus reflecting the system of the transmission of news in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. For a long time, news did not travel fast. News on the same topic may have been

54

A list of the most frequently used words in the London Gazette is given in Fries (1997a: 162-163). Among the verbs it is say, among the nouns day, and among the adjectives late, which are used most frequently. 55 E.g. the characterization of the London Gazette as a boring newspaper, most recently repeated by Clarke (2010: 37): “For all that, it [The Gazette] was a most unsatisfactory newspaper”. 56 The term dateline is used by Studer (2008), while Claridge (2010: 590) refers to them more appropriately as place- and datelines. Even datelines change their format. In the ZEN Corpus the formulation Out of + place name used in the 1620s (cf. several examples in Chapter 1 of this volume) no longer occurs.

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transmitted from different places and therefore show up under different datelines. They may even contradict one another.57 Studer (2003 and 2008) regards any form of heading as a headline and gives a detailed analysis of them based on the years 1701 and 1741 of the ZEN Corpus (Studer 2008: 113-139). He also adds a chapter on syntactic foregrounding in newspapers from the ZEN Corpus of 1791 and data from the Rostock Newspaper Corpus for the years 1830 and 1860 (Studer 2008: 140-163). Headlines come in gradually. The New State of Europe of May 1701 in its news section, has a brief period of headers in capital letters giving the country of the news (PORTUGAL, SPAIN, ITALY,…), often followed by headlines Reflections on PORTUGAL, SPAIN, ITALY, but by November The New State of Europe looks indistinguishable from all the other papers of the period. As early as 1721 Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal has the header FOREIGN AFFAIRS. In the papers in the ZEN Corpus of 1731, headlines giving the names of foreign countries (ITALY, GERMANY), or, from home towns (LONDON, DUBLIN, EDINBURGH) begin to appear. Read’s Weekly Journal seems to be the first distinguishing between FOREIGN AFFAIRS and HOME AFFAIRS. The Daily Post of 1741 gives shipping news under the headline PORT NEWS, the Daily Journal of 1731 and the London Daily Advertiser of 1751 under HOME PORTS. 4.1.2. Speech and thought presentation The beginning of a text is frequently marked by some type of “authenticating speech reports” (Jucker 2006: 112-114). These are phrases, most of which refer to places, letters or ‘advices’. Jucker (2006: 111-118) looked manually at material in the ZEN Corpus, of two newspapers each over five decades (1671, 1701, 1731, 1761, and 1791). This study could easily be extended to the whole corpus, preferably foreign and home news only, and the individual items would have to be retrieved automatically. This would enable a diachronic analysis from the late 17th to the end of the 18th century and it may be worthwhile to look at individual newspapers, even if they existed only for a short period of time, as Jucker (2006: 123) pointed out “that each newspaper had its own characteristic features that differed from other newspapers”.

57 Cf. the detailed description of news items in the London papers of 1701 in Fries (2010a).

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The phrases to look for are certainly ‘tis said, letters from …say, advices from … say, they write from, and a list of two dozen verbs used in this construction. 46% of the instances found by Jucker (2006: 113) are ‘unidentified speech acts’ introduced by ‘tis said, of which there are 235 instances in the whole ZEN Corpus: 15) ‘Tis said, His Majesty will remove his Court the 12th instant to Windsor, and from thence to Oxford at Christ-Church College. (1691lgz02661:s:15.2)

Future studies of authorial presence, as reflected in first-person and second-person personal pronouns in news reports between 1665 and 1765, will supplement the relevant studies carried out by Brownlees and Bös.58 4.1.3. Paragraphs and sentences Paragraph length is one of the points which may be used for the differentiation into quality and popular newspapers (cf. Schneider 2002: 103-106, Fries 2010a). Paragraph length can be measured by the number of words or by the number of sentences they contain. Paragraphs of more than one sentence will have to be checked to see whether the individual sentences belong thematically together or whether they appear in one paragraph only because they are news items from the same source. Individual newspapers must first be checked as to their policy of separating paragraphs: it is in the early decades of news reporting that different types of news occur in one paragraph.59 Sentence length has also been discussed by Schneider (2002: 98-100), who observed that that in spite of a rise in the 18th century “sentence length has generally decreased since 1700”. Mass readership, the need to read faster, and a movement closer to the spoken word (especially in the 19th and 20th centuries) are the reasons she adduces for this change. Sentence length in the ZEN Corpus for 1671 was 46.1 words, by 1701 it was down to 33.84 words, the highest result in the 18th century was for 1721 with 36.68 words, from whence it fell continuously to 30.32 words in 1761 (to 29.35 words in 1791).60 Reports of accidents show a similar development: before the 18th century, they are, on average, 65 words long,

58

Cf. Brownlees Chapter 1, section 3, and Bös Chapter 3, section 3.4 of this volume. Examples for accidents embedded in a longer paragraph are given in Fries (2012). 60 Details in Fries (2010b). 59

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between 1701 and 1741 only about 40 words, and for the years from 1751 onwards, the figure drops to 30 words (Fries 2012). Besides sentence length, sentence complexity should be addressed as a stylistic factor. Such an analysis depends, however, on a tagged corpus. Preliminary results for the relative frequency of finite verbs, subordinating and coordinating conjunctions per s-unit show a significant decrease during the 18th century as compared to the texts of the late 17th century (Fries 2010b: 31). The analysis of the complexity of noun phrases, especially the subject noun phrase as a typical feature of news language may also show both chronologically and between different newspapers. In order to arrive at useful results it is important to keep the various text classes strictly apart. The ZEN Corpus shows that proclamations, addresses, announcements, and occasionally reports of crimes have the largest number of words per sentence. Foreign news, home news, accidents, lost and found, letters, essays, and reviews are in a middle group, and shipping news, advertisements, weddings, births, and deaths have the smallest number of words (Fries 2010b: 28). The longer sentences in the London Gazette are not due to longer sentences in the news section, but to the large number of non-news texts: proclamations and addresses. With an enlarged corpus one can attain figures for individual text classes. Among foreign news it may be particularly interesting to compare onesentence news items to longer reports. 4.1.4. Stylistic comparisons Computer programmes which can show the differences between two or more texts would be very useful for an analysis of the similarities and differences between individual newspapers reporting on the same events. Fries (2010a) discusses three events of the year 1701: the situation at the Spanish Court after the death of King Charles II, the death of the Prince of Monaco in Rome, and a speech by the chancellor to the States of Lower Austria. This type of study should be extended on a much larger scale, in order to prove or disprove some of the claims made about the quality or readability of early newspapers. On the basis of the reports on these three events, The London Gazette, in 1701, was a newspaper for which readability was a major concern, but an educated reader may well have preferred The Post Boy to the London Gazette, whose classification as a popular paper may need some reconsideration (Fries 2010a). Comparing other text genres with newspaper language can yield interesting results. Kohnen (2009) looks at religious discourse and compares this with news discourse. Although the keywords typical of religious texts

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also occur in newspapers, albeit to an extremely small extent, news discourse is, not surprisingly, “a purely secular domain” (Kohnen 2009: 88). Letters and book advertisements from the mid 18th-century, but especially for the years 1761 and 1771, are the source of many religious words.

4.2. Graphemics The study of spelling variants in early English newspapers can yield interesting, even surprising results, given that the number of occurrences is big enough. Fischer and Schneider (2002) follow the loss of the –ick spelling in words like publick, musick, republick, catholick, or physick, which is regarded as the standard spelling in the 18th century. Before the turn of the century -ick was the only form, there is just one instance of the spelling public in 1701. But this spelling became popular in the newspapers of 1741 and 1751. For many words, -ic spellings were the rule in the corpus for 1761. Fischer and Schneider (2002: 140f) have a point that this spelling was not an American innovation proposed by Noam Webster, but occurred much earlier in newspaper language. None of the papers in the ZEN Corpus, they argue, had a strict house style, although, as so often, larger newspaper corpora, and corpora of other 18th-century texts would be necessary for a complete picture. A standard phrase of the newspapers in the ZEN Corpus is the use of ‘tis instead of it’s or it is as in: 16) ‘Tis said, there has been a great Dispute in a Council of War between the Prince of Vaudemont and Marshal de Catinat, and that the former is much dissatisfied that nothing has been done to hinder the Progress of the Germans, which very much encourages their Friends in Italy.

It is most frequently used as a genre-specific way of introducing a report without giving away its source. There are five spelling variants, ‘tis, tis, it’s, its and it is, of which ‘tis is the favoured form until 1711 (61.6%), and is still in frequent use until 1751 (35.3%). By 1761 it has shrunk to 6.6%. With the decline of ‘tis, the rise of it is begins (Fries 2006b: 106), while the modern colloquial form it’s occurred only until the beginning of the 18th century, but hardly after 1701. As shown in Fries (2006b) the ZEN Corpus is big enough for an overall survey, but very much less so, when it comes to the analysis of the usage in individual newspapers. One result in Fries (2006b: 109) is that the Flying Post of 1701, surprisingly, uses it’s much more frequently than any other paper of that year.

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5. Outlook First of all, for any future studies of early newspaper language the corpus of newspapers should be widened considerably. Using the ZEN Corpus as a basis, one should, first, make sure that an extended version would include a number of papers that are not part of the ZEN Corpus at the moment. Section 2 gives the necessary information. Secondly, more issues of those papers that are already in the ZEN Corpus should be added, not only to give future studies a broader basis, but also to enable better comparisons between different newspapers of the same period. In Fries (2010a) I have shown that by extending the ZEN Corpus for 1701, one could make stylistic analyses that are not possible with the present ZEN Corpus. The years between 1701 and 1721 are particularly interesting because during this period a number of tri-weekly newspapers and the newly established daily papers were available. Similar concentrations for an extension could be profitable for the period around 1731 with the inclusion of the first advertisers and perhaps beginning around 1761 to 1791 with new newspapers leading to the 19th century. In order to restrict one’s choice to a manageable size, newspapers included should have a certain longevity of at least, perhaps, a year or even a decade. Thirdly, the inclusion of provincial papers and papers from Scotland and Ireland (see 2.2.2 and 2.2.3 above) depends on the study interests of future researchers. On the one hand, it does not seem a very urgent extension, but, on the other hand, they would no doubt be an interesting collection to look at. They would also mean that the compiler cannot fall back entirely on the collection of the British Library, but would have to go elsewhere to other libraries in the United Kingdom. Fourthly, text classes as established in the ZEN Corpus have been very useful for the study of newspaper language. They should be defined more clearly so as to avoid overlaps. Text classes could also be used as a criterion for newspapers to be included. The presence of news, both foreign and domestic, would be a basic criterion. This would include weeklies introduced by an essay or a text in instalments, but exclude journals with no reference to daily events. Finally, tagging and parsing of the ZEN Corpus and its extension should be considered. One of the major obstacles are the idiosyncratic spelling conventions of early newspapers. Several attempts are being made in Zurich to normalize spelling for certain study purposes. In addition, existing programmes could be adapted for running on the ZEN Corpus.

CHAPTER THREE FROM 1760 TO 1960: DIVERSIFICATION AND POPULARIZATION BIRTE BÖS

1. Major developments in the British press from 1760 to 1960 In describing the newspaper landscape of the period envisaged in this chapter, we have to face two major problems. Firstly, we are dealing with a quite extensive time span. As pointed out in the introduction, the decision to do so is essentially tied to the situation in the corpus landscape (cf. section 2). Secondly, the eighteenth and particularly the nineteenth century saw an incredible explosion in the newspaper market, yielding the newspaper landscape increasingly more complex. There is a whole range of factors responsible for the developments: political, economic and social changes, demographic and cultural aspects, legal and institutional constraints as well as technological innovations need to be considered (cf. e.g. Esser 1998). Obviously, I can only provide a rough sketch of the newspaper landscape of the time. Particular attention will be given to the development of popular journalism. I will outline major steps in the popularization process of the British press and discuss attempts to classify newspapers on a popular/quality-scale.

1.1 The eighteenth century As described by Fries in Chapter 2, the repeal of the Newspaper Licensing Act in 1695 stimulated the foundation of new newspapers at the dawn of the eighteenth century, and the newspaper market started to show the first signs of diversification. However, this short period of creativity stopped when the first series of Stamp Acts was introduced in 1712. The

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“taxes on knowledge” (Berridge 1978: 247) imposed by the acts increased dramatically, reaching their height in 1815. Until their final abolition in 1855, the stamp acts were a major impact factor determining more than one century of newspaper development. They rendered many newspapers very short-lived and caused newspaper merging and lower publication frequencies. They also triggered significant changes in newspaper format and layout, as publishers tried to cram in more and more material in larger sheets with a higher number of columns and smaller type (cf. e.g. Schneider 2002: 20-21, Williams 2010: 62-63). As regards contents, Black (1992: 13-14) points out that “[i]n essence, the reader was given more of the same”, i.e. mainly political news, often reproduced by a “scissors and paste” technique from other newspapers. The eighteenth century witnessed some major steps towards more freedom of the press, with fewer constraints from the state. At the beginning of the period under discussion, parliamentary reporting was still suppressed, misreporting being one of parliament’s major anxieties. The struggle of the press to get a foot into parliamentary reporting is often considered as “a fundamental part of the struggle for democracy in Britain” (Williams 2010: 71). Several important steps mark the path to this aim. In 1764/65 general warrants were abolished after the great controversy about John Wilke’s attack on the king’s speech in North Briton, issue 45 (cf. Hampton 2004: 30). In 1768, the right to report parliamentary affairs was finally achieved, parliamentary proceedings were allowed from 1771 onwards (cf. Studer 2008: 20). Yet, self-censorship was still quite common, as Hampton (2004: 31) points out. With Fox’s Libel Act in 1792, another significant step in the liberalization process was made. The act demanded that the question whether libel had occurred was to be decided by a jury, not individual judges. Still, this did not mean that the risks of the profession had been erased (cf. Engel 1996: 19). For example, the Seditious Societies Act (1799-1807), trying to control the printing industry and prevent the publication of rebellious ideas, required printers to include their names and locations on their products. In fact, the question of libel remained significant well into the nineteenth century, one of the major problems being that “truthfulness was no defense against the charge of libel” (Hampton 2004: 31). This only changed with the new law in 1843. In the decades to follow, governmental control further decreased. However, market forces and advertisers’ demands came to take over regulating functions (cf. Hampton 2004: 4344). In that respect, one can indeed claim, as Williams does, that, regarding

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liberalization, “[n]ewspaper history is not a tale of progress but one of changing forms of censorship” (2010: 14). In the course of commercialization, advertisements consumed increasingly more space and were often placed prominently on the front pages. Political contents were supplemented by non-political news, e.g. regarding social habits, fashions, theatre, etc. Additionally, sports news became a regular feature by the 1780s (cf. Black 1992: 14). Williams concludes that, towards the end of the century, it was “possible to see the basic shape of the modern British newspaper emerge” (2010: 5).

1.2 The nineteenth century—general trends At the turn of the nineteenth century, the developments in the newspaper market were still strongly influenced by the Stamp Acts. At their peak in 1815, taxes of four pence per copy had to be paid (Schneider 2002: 21). Yet, the rising newspaper prices did not stop people from reading. Sharing copies or hiring them for a small fee from shops, and reading in coffeehouses, at inns and taverns was a common practice in the eighteenth century. According to contemporary estimations, one copy was probably seen by 10 to 30 readers, even after hiring had been made illegal at the end of the eighteenth century (cf. Asquith 1978: 100-101). At that time, the British newspaper landscape mainly consisted of the London morning dailies, the evening papers which were published twiceor thrice-weekly, and the provincial weeklies (Asquith 1978: 99). Then, two new types of papers quickly gained importance: the daily evening papers and the Sunday papers (cf. section 1.3). In the segment of London morning papers, The Times (founded in 1785 as The Daily Universal Register and renamed in 1788) remained in an unchallenged top selling position until 1855. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was outselling its rivals, the Morning Herald, Morning Chronicle and Morning Post added together, by four times (Engel 1996: 21). The Times was characterized by an unmatched authority and clearly directed at a minority of elite people (cf. Engel 1996: 24). Yet, when the stamp duties were reduced in 1836 and finally abolished in 1855, more and more newspapers started to compete in an increasingly commercialized market. The prices of newspapers could be lowered and papers became affordable to a wider public. With the Daily Telegraph (and Courier), the first penny national paper was established which cost only half the price of the competing morning papers. Others, such as the Standard, adapted their prices. Circulation figures exploded, rising by 600% from 1855 to 1880, amounting to a total annual circulation of 340

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million which kept growing in the decades to follow (Schneider 2002: 21).1 Obviously, other factors had their share in this development. The nineteenth century brought about massive technological innovations. With the introduction of new, mechanized paper-making processes, paper prices decreased (cf. Griffiths 1992: 35, Hampton 2004: 36). In the printing business, substantial breakthroughs were reached with the introduction of steam-powered presses (1814), the invention of the rotary press (1946), which printed up to 25,000 copies per hour, and further improved technologies which, in the 1870s, made the production of 168,000 copies per hour possible (Schneider 2002: 22; Williams 2010: 76). News gathering was facilitated by the invention of the electric telegraph (1844), the first transatlantic cable (1866) and the first telephones for news reporters (1878). From 1851 onwards, journalists could also rely on the information distributed by the newly established news agencies. Reuters was the first, and others such as Central Press and Press Association followed in the 1860s (Schneider 2002: 22-23). There was an increasing professionalization in the press business, and journalism became a full-time occupation with which one could actually earn a living (Golding et al. 2005: 7). In addition to the wider availability and affordability of newspapers, the changing living conditions at the time of industrialization had an impact on the reading habits of people. Whereas before the 1850s, reading was “as much a social as a solitary experience” (Williams 2010: 80), this changed drastically in the second half of the century (Schneider 2002: 23). For example, as the cities and the railway network both grew at an enormous speed, more and more members of the ascending middle class could afford to live in comfortable, well-lit houses in the suburbs (Bédarida 1991: 20, 32-33). People no longer had to hire newspapers, they read their own copies at home and on the trains to work. Obviously, the growing literacy rate also played a role in the increase of newspaper production. Particularly the 1870/71 Education Acts have often been considered important for the development of popular papers, as with increasing literacy, the number of potential new readers of serial publications was enlarged. However, studies in newspaper history have long pointed out that the effects of the Acts might have been

1

It is difficult to provide precise circulation figures, particularly for the period between 1855 and 1931. Before that period, the governments had kept a record, and afterwards, the work was taken over by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The latter’s figures allow for a more well-founded calculation.

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overestimated and general political and economic developments of the time should not be neglected (cf. Williams 1970: 16; Hampton 2004: 10).2 Anyway, the late Victorian press targeted a growing mass market, and, after decades of diversification, it was also characterized by increasing concentration of newspaper ownership which is, for example, related to the increasing expenses of new technologies and the growing reliance on advertising profits (Hampton 2004: 33). It was in the latter half of the nineteenth century that the foundations were laid for the establishment of the modern range of quality and popular papers, and new journalistic practices were encouraged which were to become known as “New Journalism” (cf. section 1.4).

1.3 The development of the popular press in the nineteenth century Focusing on the popular press of the nineteenth century, there are two major kinds of newspapers whose development needs to be taken into account: the radical press and the Sunday press. They shared their appeal to a new reading public, yet their approaches differed considerably. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, independent newspapers such as the Political Register, Black Dwarf, and the Poor Man’s Guardian started to emerge, which stood in stark contrast to the stamped, ‘respectable’ papers. Whereas the latter represented bourgeois opinions and “provided the middle class with a sense of identity” (Williams 2010: 77), the ‘radicals’ embodied the voices of the working class. Its editors, Williams claims, can be considered as the “real heroes of popular journalism” (1970: 17). They often came from the same social background as their readers. As the radicals typically remained unstamped and illegal, not only their writers and editors, but also their sellers had to face severe punishment. For example, Asquith (1978: 112) estimates that between 1830 and 1836 nearly 800 publishers and sellers were imprisoned for breaking the stamp acts. Lord Ellenborough, in his comment on the Six Acts of 1819, makes clear that “[i]t was not against the respectable Press that this Bill was directed, but against a pauper press…” (cited in Williams 1970: 19). Despite their being illegal, the radicals were outselling the legal press by 2

Mitch, in his study on popular literacy in Victorian England, writes: “Although the working classes read newspapers and wrote letters far more in 1900 than in 1840, it is difficult to determine if these practices were universal at the end of the nineteenth century” (1992: 201).

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far, their news flow appeared eruptive and unstoppable (cf. Engel 1996: 25). The radical press focused intensely on working class issues, and they provided an important frame for the set up of organizational structures such as political associations and trade unions (Williams 2010: 78). For example, they played an important role in the Chartist movement, the Northern Star3 being the leading paper in this “first political movement of working people in Britain” (Williams 2010: 91). With a language described as “stridently class-conscious... the razor-sharp rhetoric of class war” (Epstein, cited in Conboy 2002: 79), and its visual elements taken over from the popular cheap press, the Northern Star enjoyed great popularity among working class readers. This “new rhetoric” approach, Conboy points out, “raised the political awareness of the dominated classes by using language and recurrent themes which drew upon the political experience of these readers” (2010: 70). Readers’ letters were a common means of connecting papers and readers. Furthermore, the radicals used gifts and special offers to appeal to their audiences and win subscribers (cf. e.g. Williams 2010: 92). Parallel to the radical press, the first Sunday papers emerged, which showed their fullest development in the second half of the nineteenth century and outclassed their daily rivals at the end of the century. The first Sunday paper, the British Gazette and Sunday Monitor was started in 1779 by Elizabeth Johnson4 (cf. Engel 1996: 26). Further prominent examples are Bell’s Life in London (launched 1796), News of the World (1843), Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1842) and Reynolds’s Newspaper (1850), the latter two being the circulation leaders in the field (Berridge 1978: 249). They appealed to readers “who had neither money nor leisure to buy and consume a daily newspaper” (Williams 2010: 83). Berridge describes the Sunday papers as “a synthesis between the old non-political traditions of chap-book and last dying speech and the political radicalism of the unstamped and the Chartist papers” (1978: 247). With this combination of the ‘old’ and the ‘new rhetoric’ of popular journalism (cf. Conboy 2002: 68-71), the Sunday papers took the first major steps towards the establishment of a commercial popular press. Their interest in gossip and sensationalism, which relates back to the well-known material found in chapbooks, ballads and pamphlets, characterizes 3

In contrast to its predecessors, the Northern Star, which was founded in 1837, was stamped. 4 As Williams points out, the growing newspaper market attracted people “from the periphery and margins of British society” (2010: 8). Here, even women found one of the scarce possibilities to engage in professional life.

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the commercial popular press to this day (cf. Conboy 2003: 45). Williams (1978: 48) points out that “[i]t is strictly comparable, in social terms, with the contemporary London theatre, itself now largely popular in audience, and with melodrama as a leading form”. Yet, as regards their connection with their readers, Berridge argues, they were still quite similar to the radicals, carrying over the close relationship between paper and readers “as part of the cultural tradition” of the Chartist papers (1978: 250-251). For example, reader participation was ensured in the well-received correspondence columns, and even advertising was predominantly smallscale classified at the end of the nineteenth century. Still, commercialization could not be overlooked. Next to the content, it manifested itself also in the stylistic preferences of the Sunday papers. Rather critically, Williams remarks: “the radical style is one of genuine arousal; the commercial style is one of apparent arousal as a cover for an eventual if temporary satisfaction” (1970: 21). Purporting a view which was to become the common perception in Critical Discourse Analysis in the late 1970s (cf. van Dijk 2001: 352), Williams labels this kind of journalism “pseudo-popular press” (1970: 19). In the competition, the sensationalist Sunday papers turned out to be the winners, not only beating the radicals, but also the “respectable” educational journals which were brought onto the market between the 1830s and the 1850s (cf. Williams 1970: 22, Conboy 2010: 73). Their “heteroglossic mixture” (Conboy 2002: 81) was obviously more attractive to a mass readership than the instructive approach of the educational journals or the exclusive focus on political issues the radicals purported, especially in view of “a liberalizing capitalist economy of leisure and entertainment in the middle years of the nineteenth century” (Conboy 2002: 67). The radical press particularly suffered from the growing economic pressure—new printing technology and large-scale distribution required investments which many independent editors could not afford (cf. Williams 1970: 22-23). The successful editors in popular periodical journalism, such as Edward Lloyd, had managed to attract large-scale audiences not only by their commercial mixture of (mild) pro-working class positions and the expanded use of sensationalism, but also by introducing new business techniques, and marketing their papers in country-wide advertising (Berridge 1978: 256). In that way, popular periodical journalism “provided the bridge between the mid-century popular press and the evolution of the recognizable mass circulation daily newspapers of the twentieth century.” (Conboy 2002: 93).

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1.4 From the nineteenth into the twentieth century— New Journalism In the second half of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, the British press reached the height of its influence and expansion (cf. Hampton 2004: 19). As the daily press started to dominate the newspaper market, drastic shifts in industrial and commercial organization, as well as professional and technological changes triggered the beginning of a new era: New Journalism. The term itself is actually credited to one of the period’s contemporaries, the British poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold. He used it in one of his essays in 1887 where he expressed his discontent with the development of the Pall Mall Gazette under W.T. Stead’s direction, criticizing this kind of journalism as ‘featherbrained’ (cf. Baylen 1972: 367). As indicated in section 1.3, the popular papers are ascribed a central role in the transition to new journalistic practices. Yet, there are different ideas as to who the trendsetters were at the end of the nineteenth century. Some favour Stead and his Pall Mall Gazette, with its emphasis on sensationalism, its innovative features of investigative journalism and typographical elements in the fashion of the American penny dailies. Others attribute the radical The Star (founded in 1888) a leading role (cf. Engel 1996: 44-45). The Star editor T.P. O’Connor, Conboy claims, reworked Stead’s “new journalistic techniques in order to fashion a mass appeal, which was addressed to the working classes, seeking to combine campaigning with radical social perspectives” (2010: 110). New Journalism stands for major changes in newspaper content, layout and style. Yet, Hampton cautions, “the transformations attributed to the New Journalism seem to have developed more gradually” (2004: 37) and in less linear ways than often indicated. This view finds evidence in newspaper histories (e.g. Brown 1985), and also in linguistic studies as presented in section 3.2 (e.g. Ungerer 2002). Here, I will only outline some significant tendencies. A major discursive shift, which occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, is that from the ‘educational’ to the ‘representative’ ideal of the press. The latter approach, fostering the idea of the press as a “Fourth Estate”,5 essentially sought to represent the readers and speak on their behalf, rather than informing, challenging and persuading them as in 5

The concept of the independent Fourth Estate has been challenged by many news historians. For example, Boyce considered it a myth which “enabled the British press to stake a claim for a recognized and respectable place in the British political system” (1978: 26), but ignored political realities.

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the educational approach characteristic of mid-Victorian papers. Hampton (2004), viewing this process through the lens of contemporary writers, offers a detailed discussion of the complex historical circumstances triggering this change. Economic motivations, which are often foregrounded (e.g. Goodbody 1985: 26), are aptly summarized in the anonymous nineteenth century poem which decorates the front page of Engel’s monograph (1996). Tickle the public, make ‘em grin, The more you tickle, the more you’ll win; Teach the public, you’ll never get rich, You’ll live like a beggar and die in a ditch.

As new technologies secured the flow of news, the question was no longer how to fill the pages, but what to include. News values gained further importance in the selection and processing of news. The homocentric principle apparently took over a particularly dominant role, as a “new prioritization of ‘human interest’” could be observed (Campbell 2003: 21), and successful journalists were expected to have “a quick understanding of the smaller emotions and an ability to tell of them” (Lee 1976: 121). Lee furthermore points out that New Journalism provided “an increasing emphasis upon news as against opinion and commentary” (1976: 121). The abundance of news available, together with other aspects such as increasing professionalization and the process of adaptation to a mass market, also brought about substantial stylistic changes. For a long time, editors had merely taken over various kinds of discourse (e.g. parliamentary and court room proceedings, public speeches and material from other newspapers), rendering them unchanged and producing “a medley of various public styles, voices and types of texts” (Matheson 2000: 564). In the era of New Journalism, this medley was more and more replaced by the practice of interweaving information from various sources into a unique, recognizable style, thus separating “information from the style of language in which it arrived at the newspaper” (Matheson 2000: 567).6

6 Matheson even goes so far as to say born until a news discourse emerged reinterpreted” in the early nineteenth discussions provided in the previous pessimistic.

that “[t]he news story, as a story, was not allowing information to be reshaped and century (2000: 567-568). In view of the chapters, this position appears a bit too

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Additionally, journalists would use innovative practices like the descriptive parliamentary sketch (Lee 1976: 120-121) and, of course, the news interview. The latter is typically attributed to the influence of the American popular press. It was, for example, extensively used in the New York Herald “as a spokespiece for the values of ordinary people against the privileged classes and, most importantly, in creating a textual collusion between the vitality of this reporting of direct speech and the speech patterns of the readers” (Conboy 2010: 99). As mentioned above, in Britain it was particularly favoured by W.T. Stead, who conducted the first interview in 1883 and brought it to perfection on 134 occasions in the year to follow (Conboy 2010: 108). Obviously, the practice of rearranging and modifying source texts had an impact on the structural organization of news reports as well. Accordingly, the emergence of the inverted pyramid structure, moving away from chronological accounts to prioritizing most important facts, is usually attributed to the period of New Journalism. Whereas Conboy claims that “by 1920 the inverted pyramid had become the only form of reporting taught to journalists” (2010: 138), Engel estimates that “since at least the 1930s trainee reporters have been instructed to get the news in the first paragraph” (1996: 66) (see section 3.2 for a more detailed discussion). It was also at the dawn of the twentieth century that news stories were increasingly placed on the front pages, which had long been preserved for advertisements. Regarding that fundamental change, the Daily Express is considered as the trendsetter, which, in 1901, started to dedicate its front pages to news (Conboy 2010: 119). The alteration appeared necessary, as selling was increasingly relocated from home delivery to the streets. There, at the newsstands, the various dailies had to compete for potential buyers with attractive front page news (cf. Lee 1976: 120-121). The linguistic changes observable in New Journalism naturally triggered discussions among the contemporaries. For example, “Frederick Greenwood, at the end of the century, found the language of the ‘new journalism’ refreshing, with its ‘unpedantic, nervous, flexible good English of common life [...]’” (Lee 1976: 129). Yet, the general tenor was more critical, pointing out that “the literalisation of spoken slang”, a restricted vocabulary and the reiteration of mistakes in the press deteriorated the standards of language use (cf. Lee 1976: 130). Obviously, a modern linguist would not be as pessimistic as the nineteenth century critics. Taken together, the changes outlined above clearly mirror a principal shift in the relationship of newspapers and readers at the age of New Journalism, which has exerted a major impact on the concepts of modern news writing.

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1.5 The early twentieth century—Tabloidization Whereas many features commonly associated with modern popular journalism were already introduced in the nineteenth century (or even earlier), tabloidization in the literal sense only started at the beginning of the twentieth century. Alfred Harmsworth, dubbed the “[t]he greatest newspaper man” in The Encyclopedia of the British Press (Griffiths 1992: 292), took a leading role in this process. Together with Joseph Pulitzer, the later Lord Northcliffe produced the prototype of a tabloid on 1 January 1901. On that day, Pulitzer’s New York World appeared in a format half the size of a normal newspaper and was labelled ‘tabloid newspaper’ by its joint editors (cf. Conboy 2010: 118). In 1903, Harmsworth’s Daily Mirror was the first British newspaper to be regularly published in tabloid format. It was particularly directed to women readers, yet, its tremendous success only started after its relaunch in 1904 (see below). The introduction of the tabloid format was not the only innovation Harmsworth brought to the British newspaper market. As the Daily Mail proves, which he launched in 1896, he had a good hand in finding just the right combination of price, content and style to appeal to a mass market. It was this new blend of (often established) elements, Engel (1996: 59) emphasizes, that made Harmsworth’s journalism so ground-breaking. As promoted in its head, the Daily Mail was “A Penny newspaper for One Halfpenny”. It avoided radical positions, and exploited political and social topics mainly for their marketing potential. Furthermore, personalization, conversationalization and emotionalization were important selection and processing principles featured by the Daily Mail. Stories were typically brief, and digestibility was further improved by the generous use of captions (Conboy 2010: 116). Yet, despite some more radical experimentation with front page design in the dummy versions preceding the first edition, the front pages actually published were still remarkably similar to respectable competitors like The Times. This, Engel (1996: 59-60) claims, was actually intended: “Cheap without the appearance of cheapness”. His great commercial success enabled Lord Northcliffe to dominate wide areas of the national press, saving, for example, The Observer and The Times from financial ruin. Controlling “a larger share of Britain’s newspaper circulation than did Rupert Murdoch in the 1990s” (Chapman/Nutall 2011: 124), Lord Northcliffe instigated the era of the press barons. His empire was inherited by his brother Harold Harmsworth (Lord Rothermere) after his death in 1922. The decades to follow were characterized by fierce competition in the newspaper market, leading to intense circulation wars. Sales figures

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mushroomed, from an estimated total circulation of 3.1 million in 1918, to 4.7 million in 1926 and 10.6 million in 1939 (Murdock/Golding 1978: 130). Particularly the popular papers tried to lure readers by rewarding them with free insurance schemes, but also with more ordinary gimmicks such as pens, kitchen equipment or books (cf. Murdock/Golding 1978: 131). And they were quite successful. The 1930s are considered the “period of greatest expansion in terms of sales and readers and of the commercialization of the popular newspaper markets” (Conboy 2010: 119). At that time, new competitors had established in the media market— the cinema, which triggered a “visual reorientation of the press”, and the radio, which made newspapers pay more attention to truthfulness and reinforced the distinction of news and opinion in the newspaper (Williams 2010: 152). Certainly, the press had to redefine its role, placing more emphasis on explanation, comment and also personalization—a development which was reinforced as the twentieth century proceeded and television became another major rival (cf. Denton 1993: 42-43). It is also assumed that the impact of the radio, with its medial and conceptual orality, made it easier for the language of immediacy to creep into the print news. The importance of visual images is recognizable in the populars of the time, which, as Conboy points out, combined two well-established kinds of newspapers—“the illustrated newspaper and the popular Sunday paper” (2010: 119). The Daily Mirror had, since its relaunch in 1904, tempted its readers with “its playful outlook and fresh focus on photography and illustration, including the introduction of the American-inspired cartoon strip” (Johansson 2007: 16). In the 1930s, under editorial director Harry Guy Bartholomew, the Daily Mirror began its “Tabloid Revolution” when it introduced heavy black headlines very different from what readers had seen so far. Yet, “it still needed to find an authentic voice to match his bold appearance” (Conboy 2010: 124). The Daily Mirror appealed to an audience in the down-market sector, taking a clear working class position and adopting a vernacular style with which readers could identify. The paper made use of the time-tested device of letters, but it also introduced agony aunt Dorothy Dix and the Cassandra column, where columnist William Connor, in a provocative and populist way, discussed political issues relevant for the working class reader (Conboy 2002: 127-128). When World War II started, the Daily Mirror had found its position as “[...] the newspaper of the masses, the Bible of the Services’ rank and file, the factory worker and the housewife” (Cudlipp, cited in Conboy 2010: 125).

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During World War II and also in the first post-war years, the British press suffered from paper rationing which made the news output shrink drastically. Yet, some papers also benefitted from the circumstances. As advertising space was formally restricted, advertisers turned their attention to papers they had not considered before. Furthermore, as prices had decreased, people could buy various newspapers. With their newly won economic security, newspapers could adopt “a more critical approach to public affairs” (Williams 2010: 177). Papers generally devoted more space to hard news, catering for the people’s hunger for war-related information. It was only in the mid-1950s that “newspaper reading habits returned to normal” (Williams 2010: 177), as rationing was lifted and the volume and price of newspapers increased again. Many of the weaker newspapers disappeared, also due to the ever-growing competition from the TV-sector. The relationship between newspapers and television has been described as one of love and hate (cf. Tunstall 1996: 184). On the one hand, advertising budgets were redistributed, a development from which particularly regional newspapers and national mid-market papers suffered (Williams 2010: 181). On the other hand, TV programmes provided a wealthy source of gossip to be spread by the newspapers, and the paper’s coverage of TV programmes exerted a quite substantial influence on people’s TVwatching habits. Another trend of the 1950s was the growing specialization in professional profiles. More and more domains were covered by experts in their fields. Thus, popular papers would, for example, hire a royal correspondent, a fashion expert, etc. (cf. Williams 2010: 192). This trend coincided with the expansion of special sections in the newspapers (cf. Symon’s description of the contemporary press, 1914: 291). In 1969, the relaunch of The Sun, with its widely depoliticized content and its typical ‘sensationalist’ style, heralded another new phase in popular journalism.

1.6 Periodizing popularization One thing should be exceedingly clear by now: Tabloidization, as passionately as it has been decried lately, is certainly no phenomenon of the dawning 21th century. Yet, is tabloidization the same as popularization? And when did it actually start? Studer (2008: 75) points out that the distinction of tabloid and broadsheet styles “as such is as old as the press, and has been used since the beginning of journalism to differentiate between papers that strive to follow the code of serious news-making practice and those that are either unable or unwilling to do so.” However, as emphasized by Conboy (2002:

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7), dating the starting point of (institutionalized) popular journalism depends heavily on our notions of its readerships and objectives. Is it “for the people” or “of the people” (Conboy 2002: 36) that the popular press needs to write? Or does it, in fact, have to be written “by the people”, as Williams (1970: 14) suggests? The phrase “for the people” appears to be most comprehensive. It firstly implies a particular emphasis on the readership composition. A popular paper should cater for the needs of ‘ordinary people’,7 potentially a mass audience. Secondly, newspaper contents obviously need to be relevant for such an audience. Yet, as our historical overview has shown, the notions of what is relevant for the people oscillate between the two major poles of a radical political orientation to working class issues and a focus on entertainment, the “carnivalesque” (cf. Bakhtin 1984), which has always attracted large audiences. Thirdly, the phrase “for the people” also captures modes of reader address, with concepts such as personalization and conversationalization, whose devices make news texts more accessible to non-elite readers. Clearly, the three aspects just mentioned are inseparably interwoven. The phrase “of the people” puts particular stress on newspaper contents. Thus, popular papers would be expected to report about ordinary people and their problems. Again, this frame allows for different fillings, covering hard news about political movements of the working class as well as the human-interest material which is more commonly associated with popular newspapers, at least from a modern perspective. Finally, by mentioning the phrase “by the people”, Williams (1970: 1718) emphasizes the fact that the editors of the nineteenth-century radical press indeed shared the social background with their readers. Clearly, this is has long changed. However, various means of reader involvement, e.g. via the established tradition of readers’ letters, which found new sophistication in the nineteenth century, have ensured the participation of the people and thus helped to retain elements “by the people”.8 As the discussion in sections 3.3 and 3.4 will show, various linguistic means of conversationalization contribute to the perception of news discourse as being generated “by the people” whose use is by no means restricted to modern newspapers. 7

As Schneider (2002: 7) points out, this idea is central in the OED definition of ‘popular’: “Intended for or suited to the understanding or taste of ordinary people, [...] intended for and directed at a general readership” (OED, s.v. A.4a). 8 Clearly, there are also innovative devices of reader involvement in modern newspapers, including the new phenomenon of “citizen journalism”. They are discussed in detail by Facchinetti in Chapter 4.

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Based on our outline of British newspaper history, we can sketch some major phases in the popularization of news writing:9 (1)

Early popular print As pointed out before, elements with popular appeal have been there from the beginning of newspaper history. They could be found in the chapbooks, ballads, broadsides, almanacs and occasional pamphlets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (cf. Brownlees, Chapter 1) as well as the newspapers of the eighteenth century (cf. Fries, Chapter 2). Yet, as Williams summarizes, “[m]uch of what was ‘sensation’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not the spectacle, shock and scandal we associate with the Victorian period but more connected to popular beliefs, superstition and the low levels of education of the day” (2010: 35). (2) Victorian newspaper practices With the development of the radical press and the Sunday papers, the nineteenth century provides evidence of two major perceptions of the popular outlined above. Whereas the radical unstamped papers have often been perceived as pursuing the ‘real’ kind of popular journalism, the Sundays developed a commercialized version of journalism “for the people”, which has been criticized as ‘pseudo-popular’ (Williams 1970: 19).10 Still, adopting a more neutral position, commercialization can be considered a new trend which reinforced the long-established traditions of sensationalism and gossip, and combined them with radical political positions and innovative forms of presentation which were the forerunners of modern journalistic practices. (3) New Journalism The roots of modern popular journalism are often located in the proceedings of New Journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. For example, Engel considers the launch of the Daily Mail in 1896 “the real beginning of British popular journalism” (1996: 16), and Johansson (2007: 16) argues that it also heralded the division between down-market papers aimed at the mass market of ‘common people’ and up-market papers appealing to a small elite audience. This polarization not only manifests itself in 9

Obviously, periodization could be much more fine-grained than in this proposal which aims at an overview of major phases. 10 This characterization as ‘pseudo-popular’ is comparable to Fairclough’s (2001) use of the term ‘synthetic’ in reference to modern newspapers.

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the target audiences, but also in newspaper contents, style and reputation of the papers. (4) Tabloidization (in the literal sense) Another milestone was reached when the prototype of a tabloid came out in 1901, and the Daily Mirror started to appear as the first regular British newspaper in tabloid format in 1903. Thus, in the narrow sense, tabloidization is indeed a much younger phenomenon than popularization. (5) Tabloidization (in the broad sense) In a wider meaning, tabloidization has come to be associated with the practices brought to perfection by the Sun, in Murdoch’s relaunched version of 1969. Its editorial policy is typically characterized as “the pursuit of the sensational, the personification of stories, and the highlighting of human interest” (Rooney 2000: 106), its style as vernacular and, in more critical terms, simplistic and raunchy (e.g. Conboy 2010: 127-128). As this overview shows, the terms ‘popularization’ and ‘tabloidization’ are often used interchangeably. Not just the former, also the latter is often conceptualized in a quite comprehensive way, covering not only the format of newspapers, but also their range of contents, modes of address and the market structure involved (e.g. McLachlan/Golding 2000: 76-77). Yet, within the context of this study, the term ‘popularization’ appears more suitable than ‘tabloidization’ for two major reasons. Firstly, ‘popularization’ captures the diachronic dimension more faithfully, accounting also for newspaper development prior to the introduction of tabloids in the twentieth century. Secondly, it avoids the heavy emotional and evaluative baggage often associated with ‘tabloidization’. As Williams (2010: 10) points out, tabloidization seems to be “a euphemism” for ‘declining standards’ in the press, infiltrating the mid- and up-market papers from the down-market end of the newspaper market (cf. also Conboy 2002: 181). Obviously, our focus here is not so much on tabloidization as a valueladen-concept “that entails assumptions about what constitutes ‘good’ and socially responsible journalism”, as, for example, in Johansson’s study (cf. 2007: 35), but on the historicity of the process of popularization, especially its impact on the language of newspapers. From a linguistic perspective, the innovative potential of the popular press is intriguing. The next sections will provide a more precise characterization of linguistic traces of popularization. In section 2.3, the concept of popularization will be reexamined from the perspective of corpus compilation. Sections 3.3

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and 3.4 provide some studies on selected features of conversationalization, a concept typically associated with popularization.

2. Online archives and electronic corpora of news discourse: The eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 2.1 Overview of relevant online archives and corpora Online Archives Until not even ten years ago, research on historical English newspapers without sifting through the archives of the British Newspaper Library at Colindale was almost impossible. Now that internet facilities have tremendously improved, getting hold of material has been greatly facilitated. Online archives make it possible for large numbers of researchers to work with historical newspapers without putting fragile material at risk. By far the largest online collection of British historical newspapers is offered by the British Newspaper Archive, a cooperation between the British Library and findmypast (see http://www.britishnewspaperarchive. co.uk/help/about). Just opened at the time the first edition of this book appeared, this archive now contains some 11 million scanned newspaper pages from more than 430 titles, covering a time range from 1710-1959, and it keeps growing on a daily basis. The online Burney Collection comprises ca. 1.270 titles from various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, and can be accessed via electronic databases, free of charge for higher institutions, libraries and research councils (cf. Fries, Chapter 2, section 1). For the nineteenth century, the online collection of 19th Century British Library Newspapers provides access to 48 national and regional newspapers of the period. Just as with the Burney Collection, articles can be printed, saved and emailed. The Times Digital Archive is probably the most well-known digital archive of an individual newspaper. Started in the 1990s, it originally covered nearly a million pages from the issues published between 1785 and 1985. Recently, the archive was extended to include the period of 1986-2006, adding some 795,000 new pages.

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Other collections preserving the historical editions of individual newspapers are the Guardian and Observer Digital Archive,11 which aims at providing “more than 1.2m pages covering all major historic events over 212 years as reported at the time” and currently covers the years 1821-1990 (Guardian) and 1791-1990 (Observer). A collection of popular newspapers is found in the Daily Express and Daily Mirror Digital Archives which comprise material from the very first editions (in 1900 and 1903, respectively) to the present. Such online archives are undoubtedly a valuable source for researchers. Yet, due to their specific make-up, search capabilities not only require an indepth understanding of the archive design, but they are generally limited. As Kytö points out, “many of the search engines that come with large-scale collections are not primarily intended for linguistic study” (2011: 436). Issues of usability are also raised in MacQueen’s (2004) study on low frequency items in The Times Digital Archive, and Marshall/Hume’s (2010) discussion of “The Joys, Possibilities, and Perils of the British Library’s Digital Burney Newspapers Collection”. Thus, principled corpora are still indispensible as a basis for systematic linguistic research. That such corpora have remained rather rare to this day is certainly related to the tedious process of compiling corpora from historical newspapers. Despite the greater ease of access through online archives, corpus construction often involves manual typing of source texts or at least careful proof-reading of scanned versions of pages. In the next paragraphs, some relevant corpus projects will be introduced. A good overview of news (and other English language) corpora can be found at the Corpus Resource Database (CoRD) offered by the University of Helsinki (see http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/). Corpora One of the major historical multi-genre corpora, which (next to five other genres) includes a news component, is ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers). The corpus is still growing, currently 14 consortium members in seven countries are working on corpus version 3.3. The British news section, which has almost remained the same in ARCHER 3.1 and 3.2, focuses on hard news reports from a variety of newspapers and journals. It amounts to a total of 158,023 words arranged into 50-year intervals between 1650 and the present (cf. 11

The Guardian and The Observer are also the first British papers to be included in ProQuest Historical Newspapers (cf. www.proquest.com), which offers mainly American newspapers.

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Biber/Finegan/Atkinson 1994). In version 3.3, an extension covering the years 1600-1649 is envisioned (see the project webpage at manchester. ac.uk/archer/).12 In 2014 ARCHER was opened for online access by registered users. Some major one-genre corpora of historical news discourse have already been outlined in Chapters 1 and 2. With regard to the period covered in this chapter, the ZEN Corpus and the Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC) prove relevant. Both corpora overlap in their coverage of the eighteenth century. As described in detail by Fries in Chapter 2, the ZEN Corpus includes most of the content of the selected newspapers from the years 1671 to 1791. In contrast, the RNC focuses on news reports from 1700-2000 (cf. section 2.2 for a more detailed description). Additionally, there is a new corpus currently under construction, which further enriches the corpus landscape: the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Newspaper English (CNNE). Compiled by Erik Smitterberg at the University of Uppsala, the interim version contains 200 articles (100 each from 1830-1850 and 1875-1895), which amounts to a total of 320,000 words at the moment. The CNNE focuses particularly on editorials and reportage from provincial and metropolitan newspapers. Naturally, there is also a number of more specialized corpora. For example, the Corpus of English Newspaper Editorials (CENE) comprises 864 editorials from The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Times, and was designed for the investigation of diachronic changes in the twentieth century. Using the “constructed week” as a sampling principle, the years 1900-1993 are covered in 10-year intervals, yielding a total of 502,834 words (cf. Westin 2002: 7). Smaller, and less systematic is the collection of Times advertisements from nine years between 1788-1996, each sample comprising 60 contemporary ads (Gieszinger 2000). Obviously, the changeover from print-setting to direct journalist input via computers has tremendously facilitated feeding newspaper data into electronic corpora. It is not surprising, then, that we find such a broad range of huge corpora of modern newspaper language (cf. Facchinetti, Chapter 4).

12

The American news component has been expanded from 67,335 words (ARCHER 3.1) to 127,237 words (ARCHER 3.2) and will continue to grow in version 3.3 (for more details cf. Yáñez-Bouza 2011).

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2.2 Challenges in compiling corpora of a wide temporal range —The Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC) Obviously, it is very intriguing to have news corpora which cover large time spans, and also very necessary given the rather limited range of principled diachronic news corpora available at present. However, compiling such a corpus is, of course, a quite demanding task. As Studer points out: A corpus of early news publications ideally represents a balanced collection of publications based on text pragmatic (e.g. institutional/ cultural, social, technological and situational constellations) as well as publication-internal criteria (e.g. format, periodicity, time of publication) relevant to the specific period of time studied. (Studer 2008: 43)

It has to be acknowledged in advance that the RNC, just as the other corpora introduced above, are far from being representative in that sense. What we get from them is fascinating, yet very selective insights into the newspaper landscape of past centuries. The basic body of the RNC (RNC-1) was assembled at Rostock University between 1996 and 2000. Initiated by Kristina Schneider, the corpus was designed for an investigation of global developments in news writing, particularly the development of popular journalism over the past three centuries (Schneider 2002). Thus, the corpus comprises British news reports from 1700 to 2000. 1700 proves a suitable starting point, as the newspaper market started to diversify when the Newspaper Licensing Act was abolished in 1695 and the first daily papers started to appear. The corpus material is mainly taken from London newspapers, because it was in this important political and economic centre that newspapers appeared first and most numerously.13 RNC-1 consists of ten samples which were drawn in 30- or 40-year intervals from six newspapers per period. Each newspaper is represented by a 10,000 word sample, thus yielding a total corpus size of 600,000 words14. Table 3.1 provides an overview of the newspapers included in RNC-1. 13

The only exception is the Manchester Guardian (later The Guardian), which only started to be printed in London in the 1960s, but still was included in the corpus for an investigation of long-term developments (Schneider 2002: 27, fn. 10). 14 For more detailed information on the compilation of RNC-1, cf. Schneider 2002: 50-58.

21ST CENTURY

20TH CENTURY

19TH CENTURY

18TH CENTURY

From 1760 to 1960: Diversification and Popularization 1700 Daily Courant London Gazette Post Man Post Boy Evening Post Flying Post 1800 Times London Gazette Bell’s Weekly Messenger The World London Evening Post Morning Post 1900 Times Manchester Guardian Daily Mail Daily Express Daily Mirror Daily Sketch 2000 Times Guardian Daily Mail Daily Express Daily Mirror Sun

1730 Daily Courant London Gazette Penny London Post London Post London Evening Post London Journal 1830 Times Manchester Guardian Bell’s Life in London News of the World The Standard Morning Post 1930 Times Manchester Guardian Daily Mail Daily Express Daily Mirror Daily Sketch

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1760 Gazetteer London Gazette Penny London Post Bingley’s Journal London Evening Post Morning Post 1860 Times Manchester Guardian Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper Daily Telegraph Evening Standard Morning Post 1960 Times Guardian Daily Mail Daily Express Daily Mirror Sun

Table 3.1: Newspapers in RNC-1 From the above description it becomes clear that the data sets compiled in RNC-1 are still relatively small and the sampling intervals are quite long. We are therefore working on an extended version, RNC-2 which tackles some of the issues raised in critical discussions regarding corpus representativity such as Studer’s (2008). The corpus project has been relocated to the University of Duisburg-Essen (and thus effectively turned into the Rostock-Essen Newspaper Corpus). It is being systematically enlarged by condensing the intervals, with the aim of arriving at ten-year periods like the ZEN Corpus. One of the problems put forward by Studer, and a challenge which the RNC-compilers find quite difficult to tackle, is that fixed time samples do not mirror the tremendous increase in newspaper production and

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circulation and thus neglect “the dynamics of the genre” (Studer 2008: 48). In this relational perspective, a 60,000 word sample might be acceptable for 1700, but it is a tiny data set for 2000. Yet, as Studer (2008: 36) admits himself, it is hardly possible to find precise information on the overall news output in certain historical periods. Additionally, from a practical perspective, the adaptation of sample sizes would mean an enlargement of the corpus which would drastically exceed the given resources. Thus, for the time being, this aspect has to remain neglected in the corpus extension. In contrast to the ZEN Corpus, which comprises the full versions of the newspapers selected, the RNC focuses on news reports. Obviously, we have to acknowledge that ‘news’ and ‘news report’ are fuzzy concepts. As Jucker (2007: 103) points out, it is always problematic in diachronic research to find a suitable tertium comparationis, as linguistic resources and communicative needs of speech communities keep changing. Schneider’s choice of material was limited to “‘prototypical’ news reports, i.e. reports on foreign and home news, in contrast to specialized sections such as sports reports” (Schneider 2002: 53). She also emphasizes the importance of news reports being “usually made up of running text, consisting predominantly of complete sentences—a necessary prerequisite for syntactic studies” (2002: 53), and thus she neglects list-like items and also advertisements. On closer investigation, the corpus appears to contain a number of questionable cases (cf. the criticism by Studer 2008: 40 and Fries 2010: 220), which are critically re-examined in the compilation of RNC-2. Yet, admittedly, the procedure of an a priori selection always causes problems for the corpus compiler and inflicts certain limitations on the corpus. To pick out a random example, the Daily Telegraph (24 May 1880) contains a section labelled Events in France which, on first glance, appears perfectly suitable for the extension of the RNC. However, the eight paragraphs subsumed in this section provide a miscellaneous collection of news genres in the widest sense. The section starts with a hard news item on potential disturbances at a demonstration in Paris. It is followed by a report on the funeral of the Prince de Ligne (one of the borderline cases between hard and soft news outlined in Schneider 2002: 68) and an announcement of the service for the response of the soul to be held later. In the next paragraph, the correspondent reproduces a statement from a letter by Victor Hugo commenting on the erection of a statue. The genre status of this item is debatable. Afterwards he provides a theatre review; then he returns to a short hard news item on strike activities and finally finishes up with some almost list-like information on developments

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on the Petite Bourse. Obviously, it is not only difficult for the corpus compiler to disentangle such combinations, but it would also distort the characteristic, miscellaneous nature of such accounts wired by the foreign correspondents.15 Furthermore, our work on RNC-2 indicates that the package approach16 postulated for modern newspapers (cf. Ungerer 2000), indeed manifests itself much earlier in our material and facilitates hybrid texts which do not easily fit the established categories17 (e.g. Bell 1991, Ljung 2000—see example (1), section 3.2). Still, these classification problems are not just tied to corpora focussing on one genre like the RNC. They also occur in genre-wise more comprehensive corpora such as the ZEN Corpus when it comes to the tagging of text classes (cf. Lehmann et al 2006: 144, and also Fries’ discussion in Chapter 2, 3.1). It is true that “[i]n principle, text classification should be the result, not the basis of linguistic investigation” (Studer 2008: 46). However, this ideal—together with other idealistic suggestion such as adapting sample sizes to news output (s.a.), accepting natural intervals of the publications as ideal sampling periods and accounting for the specific media agenda, sociolinguistic parameters, etc. of each period (Studer 2008: 48)—renders the compilation of historical news corpora an impossible task. We have to cope with the scarcity and incompleteness of data, the lack of background information and the fact that corpus compilation is an extremely labour-intensive process which requires substantial human and monetary resources. Thus, RNC-2 has to allow for a comprehensive notion of “news report”, and it will remain far from being representative. Still, when interpreted with the necessary caution, it will provide yet another, more extended glimpse into the development of journalistic practices.18

15 Here is another drawback of using material from electronic archives, in which the news texts are provided in isolation and already labelled, e.g. as news, advertisements, etc. 16 In the package approach, news events are presented via a combination of various elements, e.g. news stories, which typically provide “the backbone of the presentation” (Ungerer 2000: 191) plus features, commentaries, photographs, tables, cartoons, etc. 17 Obviously, modern newspaper genre terms are of limited avail with respect to early newspapers anyway (Claridge 2010: 604). 18 Apart from the extension of RNC-1 into RNC-2, there have been various other attempts to enlarge the Rostock Newspaper Corpus, which still await their accomplishment: RNC-E sports comprises 10,000 words of sports reports from 1830-2000, RNC-Am is the foundation of an American component (still focused on nineteenth century popular papers). Probably most importantly, as a prerequisite

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2.3 Popularization revisited—Corpus-related classification of newspapers Schneider (2002), in her study on the development of popular journalism, suggests that the popular/quality-distinction already holds true for early newspapers. This conviction also has an impact on the corpus design of RNC-1 where the papers, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, are arranged in two major corpus lines, a quality and a popular one, the latter receiving further sub-division into down- and mid-market papers from the start of the twentieth century. This differentiation is based on a definition of ‘popular papers’ with respect to readership composition (‘ordinary people’ being the major target) and, above all, readership appeal, involving various external and internal criteria (Schneider 2002: 14). Thus, she regards a comparatively low price and a large circulation as external indicators of popular candidates. The list of internal criteria comprises a predominance of human-interest and soft news contents, the tendency to include pictorial elements and advertisements as well as features enhancing the readability of such papers (i.e. the use of headlines, a tendency for shorter words and sentences as well as a preference for emotionalization and personalization strategies).19 In the appendix of her work, Schneider provides newspaper profiles for all the papers included in RNC-1, which are a valuable source of information on these criteria and some more general facts. Trying to classify the papers included in RNC-1, Schneider proposes a complex weighting system for the external and internal criteria, from which she calculates a “Popular Paper Coefficient”. As demonstrated in a diagram (2002: 82), this coefficient shows a general rising trend over the past three centuries. However, she does not include any reasoning regarding the positioning of the divide between quality and popular papers, which might have been accepted too readily in the transfer of the popular/quality-dichotomy to early newspapers.20 This clear-cut for contrastive studies, RNC-G has been set up, which, at present, contains 170,000 words from German newspapers (1760-2000). 19 It might be seen as a shortcoming that Schneider (2002: 6) explicitly excludes radical papers from her discussion. Yet, this exclusion can be justified by the fact that “[t]he radical Unstamped in Britain is divorced from many of the traditional features of popular print” (Conboy 2002: 179). In RNC-2, we will leave it at that, although we have to acknowledge that, by blending out one essential part in newspaper history, the scope of the definition of ‘popular journalism’ is limited. 20 Particularly the popular papers with coefficients located near that dividing line occasionally show a closer, the same, or at least only a slightly larger distance to

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EXTERNAL CRITERIA

differentiation has been questioned particularly for the beginning of the eighteenth century (cf. Studer 2008: 40, Fries 2010). Coping with that issue, Studer (2008) in his ZEN-based study on eighteenth-century newspapers, develops socio-historical and stylistic profiles (cf. Fries, Chapter 2, 3.2). He deploys the notion of (economic and stylistic) performance, claiming that this is “the main criterion against which mass media are ultimately measured, today as much as in the eighteenth century” (2008: 51). Based on a complex system of sociohistorical variables referred to by contemporary sources and newspaper historians, he distinguishes high-, medium- and low-performance papers (2008: 65). With regard to stylistic characterization, Studer acknowledges the use of internal classification features (as Schneider 2002), suggesting a (more refined) system of criteria, based on which papers can be located on a popular-quality continuum (cf. his overview, 2008: 80-81). However, Studer points out that particularly some newspapers from the very beginning of the eighteenth century cannot be grasped in terms of the criteria suggested. He therefore postulates, as a third major category, the label ‘conservative’ for papers which neither show pronounced quality characteristics nor popular features (2008: 81)—i.e. papers which tended to take over their source texts with very little stylistic editing (such as the 1701 London Gazette). This extension of the popular-quality dichotomy appears very reasonable, and so does the emphasis on the fact that we need to allow for hybrid profiles. However, neither Schneider (2002) nor Studer (2008) provide sufficient explanation regarding the measurement and the operationalization of the criteria in their systems. Table 3.2 summarises some of the major criteria postulated in the characterization of popular newspapers. DIMENSION OF INSTITUTIONAL ACCESSIBILITY

Readership composition Price Circulation

“for the people” (Con36) “lower ranks of society”, “ordinary people” (Sch14) “cheap” (Con67), “low price” (Sch14) Large, regular mass circulation (Con88, Sch14)

INTERNAL CRITERIA

DIMENSION OF STRUCTURAL ACCESSIBILITY

Layout/structure

“more digestible, browsable format” (Con103) Reader-friendly layout, e.g. headlines, captions for orientation (Sch14) Illustrations, cartoons, pictures, etc. (Sch14, Con104)

their nearest quality counterpart than to their popular pendants (cf. the 1700, 1800, 1830 samples).

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News content: Conversationalization Personalization

Non-news content Composition of content

Normative orientation

DIMENSION OF CONTENT “of the people” (Con36) Focus on human-interest material (Sch14, Stu80) Gossip, sensation (Con67), “prioritization of entertainment” (Con180) Focus on private lives of public figures (Fai260) Advertisements (Sch14) Theming (i.e. “focus on single non-current affairs topics”) (Stu80) “heteroglossic and hybrid range of content” (Con7273), “popular miscellany” (Con180) Moralizing (Stu81), “normative morality and political concensus” (Con84) Categorization (stereotyping) (Stu81), schematization (Con171)

DIMENSION OF LINGUISTIC REALIZATION

Narrative (Stu81, Con82) “‘residual orality’ of folk culture”(Con22) Shift towards more ‘oral’ styles (Bib/Fin269) Personalization (Sch14, Stu81) also “synthetic personalization” (Fai260, Con89) Emotionalization (Sch14, Ung314) Sensationalism, melodrama (Con89) Humorous key Humour, irony, sarcasm, parody, pastiche (Stu81, Con181) Emphasis Via adjectives, attributes, lexis (Stu80) Abbreviations: Bib/Fin: Biber/Finegan 1997, Con: Conboy 2002, Fai: Fairclough 1994, Fri: Fries 2010, Sch: Schneider 2002, Stu: Studer 2008, Ung: Ungerer 1997, each + page reference Conversationalization

Table 3.2: A summary of characteristics of popular papers Drawing on Schneider (2002), Table 3.2 makes a basic distinction between external and internal classification criteria. The dimensions proposed here are derived from Landert/Jucker’s (2011) useful differentiation of three scales of “private” and “public” in mass media communication (cf. section 3.3): public accessibility (which has been further differentiated here into institutional accessibility and structural accessibility), content and linguistic realization. Obviously, these dimensions should be conceptualized not as separated levels, but as different perspectives on certain phenomena. Conversationalization and personalization, for example, are not only selection principles (and thus content-related) but also processing principles of news (and thus style-related). What is summarized in some

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keywords in this table proves indeed very complex in its actual manifestations in news discourse (cf. section 3.3 for a detailed discussion of conversationalization).

3. Corpus-based approaches to historical news language 3.1 Methodological challenges Quite clearly, all of the corpora introduced so far are (probably unavoidably) eclectic in their representation of historical news discourse. Additionally, the specific corpus designs can pose different problems. Thus, the RNC is certainly not the corpus of choice for researchers interested in specific historical events, whereas denser corpora like the Lancaster Newsbook Corpus or FEEN might be, as they allow for more fine-grained, close-up studies (cf. Brownlees, Chapter 1). This implies that we need to be careful in the choice of corpora depending on our research aims and also the interpretation of research results (cf. Studer 2008: 34, 43). Another issue involves the fact that, as Kytö (2011: 435) points out, “compilers and end-users of historical corpora would need to collaborate with computational linguists to a greater extent than has been the case so far”, as obviously corpus-design and annotation exert an enormous influence on how corpora can be exploited. As the RNC is still a comparatively small corpus, it allows for the combination of computerized searches and manual methods. Thus, the nature of the studies based on the RNC is that of an “illustrative eclecticism” (Jucker/Taavitsainen 2008: 9-10). As our results indicate (see below), the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods offers insights which an automatic search of selected features in huge corpora cannot provide. Yet, these approaches of “structured eclecticism” (Jucker/Taavitsainen 2008: 10) certainly have their advantages, especially when they pursue a multi-dimensional framework as proposed by Biber (1988) and his colleagues. Undoubtedly, it needs both perspectives to broaden our understanding of the diachronic development of news discourse. The next sections will summarize significant research results and provide some case studies on the period under discussion here, elaborating on some of the features outlined in Table 3.2. Section 3.2 takes up the feature of structural accessibility as displayed in the development of headlines and also in the structural organization of news stories. Section 3.3 will concentrate particularly on the linguistic realization of

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conversationalization as an essential element typically associated with the popularization of newspapers.

3.2 Structural accessibility—headlines and story structure Development of headlines Clearly, the layout and structural organization of eighteenth-century newspapers was essentially different from that of modern papers. Headlines, which help the modern reader orientate on the news page, were not yet an established feature (cf. Fries, Chapter 2, 4.1.1). Schneider’s quantitative and qualitative investigation of headlines and their predecessors in the RNC (2000; 2002: ch. 10) indicates that the use of headlines steadily climbed in the nineteenth century and peaked in the early twentieth century when multi-deck headlines were particularly prominent. Schneider’s analysis furthermore yields a trend for “relational headlines”, i.e. headlines of a verbal nature, including verbs or deverbal nouns, adjectives or prepositions. Studer attests such headlines an enhanced readership appeal (2008: 161). The increasing preference of verbal over nominal headlines is also confirmed in Simon-Vandenbergen’s (1981) study of grammatical patterns of headlines in The Times (18701970). Yet, other types of heads, such as those Schneider labelled as ‘report headings’ (i.e. place- and datelines such as Rome, Dec. 21) and ‘section headings’ summarizing collections of related articles (e.g. LONDON or PORT NEWS) were already quite common in the eighteenth century. Cross-heads, heading individual paragraphs within an article, are documented in RNC-1 from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards (Schneider 2000: 51-52)21. Schneider’s investigations indicate that it was usually in the papers with a popular appeal that new types of heads were introduced and most frequently used (2002: 172). As pointed out in Fries, Chapter 2, 4.1.1, the ZEN Corpus has also been investigated for its heads, particularly in Studer (2003, 2008: ch. 5, 6), where patterns of visual and syntactic foregrounding are described which paved the way for the modern headline. Studer shows that graphical patterns tend to correlate with functional types (2008: 138), and he outlines various syntactic means which add up to the emphasis of certain 21 However, there seems to be evidence that cross-heads were used even earlier, in the eighteenth century (cf. Bös 2015).

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headlines. The fact that aspects of structural accessibility and linguistic realization intersect provides further illustration of the shared space of the dimensions outlined in Table 3.2.22 Changes in the structural organization of news: News arrangement and story structure Clearly, the arrangement of news stories changed visibly with the introduction of headlines and cross-heads (see above), the adoption of a more generous layout with more spaces, and the clear graphic separation of paragraphs, whose length has steadily declined since the mid-nineteenth century (cf. e.g. Schneider’s finding’s 2002: 105). Yet, also the internal structure of the news story constitutes an important aspect of accessibility. Regarding the macro-structure of news stories, at the time of New Journalism a major change from chronological to inverted-pyramid structure occurred which is often attributed to the influence of American dailies (cf. section 1.4). Criticizing the one-sidedness of technical, political, cultural and economic theses23 explaining the rise of the “topheavy form” in American journalism, Pöttker emphasizes that the communicative potency of this structure should not be underestimated: Writing news in the inverted-pyramid form—like the reduction of text and sentence length, the illustration of articles with drawings and photographs, the use of headlines, and the sorting of news into specific sections—[...] enhances the communicative quality of the journalistic product. (Pöttker 2005: 63)

As regards its use in the British press, Ungerer’s (2002) study on newspapers from the second half of the nineteenth century indicates that the introduction of the top-down structure was not “a conscious and 22 Apart from those studies, diachronic research on headlines has remained rather scarce. A few older studies, such as Straumann (1935), Maurer (1972) and Mårdh (1980), are concerned particularly with headlines of the twentieth century. Yet, with the exception of Maurer, these were no historical studies at their time. Straumann (1935) looks at contemporary headlines from the early 1930s and Mårdh (1980) provides a synchronic comparison of 1974 front page headlines in The Times and The Daily Mirror. Maurer's (1972) study covers 42 years of headline development between 1925 and 1967. 23 These theses, respectively, attribute the structural change to the use of (potentially malfunctioning) telegraphs, to political objectives of guiding public opinion during the American Civil War, to changing educational ideals, and to exclusively commercial reasons (cf. their summary in Pöttker 2005).

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sudden change of editorial policy” (2002: 94) based on an American model, as often implied in newspaper histories. Instead he finds “three precursors of the top-down strategy” (2002: 94) which have gradually paved the way for the inverted-pyramid structure. Firstly, there is “institutionalized retrospection”, as, for example, observed in court reports, where—framed by the specific court procedure —the chronological structure is broken up into various separate accounts of a certain event, e.g. by quoting various eye witnesses (2002: 96). In RNC-1, evidence of this pattern can already be found in the 1860 sample. Secondly, the “fact-collecting approach” became more common, when —in the mid-nineteenth century—increasingly more information was available and newspapers started to devote more space to individual events. While facts seemed to be randomly arranged in many cases, the tendency of progressing “from (important) centre to the (less important) periphery” (2002: 99) was already visible in examples dating back to the 1870s. Finally, the “multi-headline approach” relates changes in the story structure to the specific development of headlines. As pointed out above, multi-deck headlines had become quite popular in the early twentieth century. Ungerer points out that this preference required “an organizing principle for the sequence of headlines offered” (2002: 100). Thus, some multi-deck headlines were chronologically arranged. Yet, others already indicated a preference of the “‘important-things-first’ principle”, e.g. in the Daily Mail 1900 (2002: 100). Ungerer concludes that these three structural developments facilitated the emergence of the top-down structure, popular papers being the trendsetters again. For example, the Daily Mirror used it regularly from 1904, whereas in the qualities, only isolated instances could be documented for the decades before 1930 (2002: 102). Structural organization: A case study of disaster news Example (1) from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 1880, an extract of one of the new texts integrated into RNC-2, illustrates that chronological and top-down approaches were not necessarily either/or choices. The corpus data display evidence of transformation processes regarding the structural organization of news stories.

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FALL OF TAY BRIDGE

APPALLING DISASTER. A TRAIN THROWN INTO THE RIVER. FEARFUL LOSS OF LIFE During a heave gale on Sunday evening a large portion of the centre of Tay bridge was destroyed, and the passenger train from Edinburgh for Dundee was thrown into the river. Every one in the train perished, the number during the first shock of the calamity, being estimated by Mr. Walker, manager of the North British railway, at nearly three hundred persons. On Monday afternoon, however, Mr. Walker telegraphed as follows:—“In my telegram of this morning I gave the number of passengers in the ill-fated train as about 300, on information supplied by one of our people, who when questioned, expressed himself very decidedly on the subject, adding that the train was usually one of the heaviest into Dundee. It is some relief to know that the actual number will instead be about 75, including servants in charge of the train.” The train which left Edinburgh at 4.15 on Sunday afternoon for Dundee, was composed of four third-class carriages, a second-class carriage, and a first-class carriage, a break van, and an engine—in all eight vehicles. The train left Burntisland punctually, and stoppages were made at all the roadside stations during the run through Fifeshire, and at most of the principal ones numbers of passengers were taken up. As St. Fort Station, three miles distant from the south end of the Tay Bridge, the train was just five minutes behind the advertised time. [...] (RNC-2, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 4 January 1880)

The first two sentences of the news story apparently constitute a leadlike summary of the main event and its consequences. Yet, quite contrary to modern readers’ expectations, the number of victims is immediately corrected in the subsequent quotation. The temporal phrase during the first shock already indicates the chronological modification to follow. Still, the passage is clearly result-oriented, particularly when compared to the second paragraph of this section which moves back to a detailed chronological account of the events. Without any further graphical separation, this paragraph moves on for 1.023 words, reporting on the train’s journey, the accident, people’s on-spot hypotheses regarding the reasons for the fall of the bridge,24 and the first rescue activities.

24

This embedded 166-word passage is marked by a clear change in evidentiality, indicated linguistically by the use of the conjunctive mood, possibility modals and various hedges.

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The graphical arrangement indicates that the event is presented in nine major parts which are separated by capitalized heads (cf. Table 3.3) and also marked by differences in their linguistic realization. HEAD OF SECTION

LENGTH OF

CONTENTS OF SECTION

SECTION

FEARFUL LOSS OF LIFE THE SIGNALMAN’S STORY STATEMENT BY AN EYE-WITNESS LIST OF THE DEAD

1.166 words 760 words 747 words 628 words

RAILWAY SERVANTS PASSENGERS

DIVERS AT WORK IN THE RIVER MESSAGE FROM THE QUEEN DESCRIPTION OF THE BRIDGE INCIDENTS OF THE CALAMITY LATER PARTICULARS

1.016 words

Summary of event Chronological account of main event Chronological eye-witness report Chronological eye-witness report (direct quotation) Mainly list-like with varying detail, Soft news item in last part

77 words

Chronological account of related events Expression of the Queen’s concerns

303 words

Technical description of the bridge

763 words

Miscellaneous accounts of consequences of event; humaninterest items; technical details; future effects/measures

774 words

Table 3.3: Structural organization of the Tay bridge reporting in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (4 January 1880) Under the head THE SIGNALMAN’S STORY, the chronology of events is repeated from the position of an eye-witness (see extract (6b) in section 3.4). This part is opened by a metatextual comment, presented in thirdperson perspective and although some emotions are described, it remains relatively distanced, using, for example, various passives. In contrast, the next STATEMENT BY AN EYE-WITNESS (cf. (6a) below) is a direct quotation, again introduced by a metatextual comment and presenting the events from another (spatial and personal) perspective. With its firstperson perspective, embedded quotations and described emotions it provides a very personal, vivid account which is finished off with an interesting reference to the audience: What had in reality happened the public know now as well as they are ever likely to know. These parts stand in sharp contrast to the LIST OF THE DEAD to follow, which displays the typical characteristics of death notices (cf. Fries

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2006a), yet with varying degrees of detail. A particularly interesting inconsistency is presented in extract (2), which varies from providing meagre name + occupation + place to an embedded soft news item with tragic human-interest detail, then again returning to a more or less elliptic structure in the last two entries of the list. 2)

[...] Mr. Benyo, photographer, Cheltenham. Robert Culross was an advertising agent in the employment of Mr. Slater, Newcastle. Culross was about 28 years of age, resided at 63, Lower View, Craig-row, Edinburgh. He was on his way to Dundee to make arrangements for his wedding, which was expected to take place early in January. It appears that he intended to travel by the late train on Saturday night, but on attempting to get into the Waverley station by a back gate leading from Regent-arch, he found it locked, and missed the train. On Sunday morning he slept too long, and was not able to leave Edinburgh till the afternoon. Walter Ness, saddler, Dundee, aged 22. A woman named Kinnear, belonging to Balmullo, who joined the train at Leuchars. (RNC-2, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 4 January 1880)

In the next part, a comprehensive matter-of-fact account of the DIVERS AT WORK IN THE RIVER chronologically describes the proceedings of the investigations in the aftermath of the disaster. This is followed by a short MESSAGE FROM THE QUEEN, or, more precisely, the reproduction of an exchange of messages between Sir Henry Ponsonby, who enquires about the events and voices the compassion of the Queen, and the Provost Brownlee giving him full details of the accident. The part DESCRIPTION OF THE BRIDGE which provides background information is particularly characterized by its ample use of technical terms and figures. The remaining parts, INCIDENTS OF THE CALAMITY and LATER PARTICULARS, provide a rather haphazard collection of aspects related to the main event. Without a clear systematic (neither chronological nor top-down), they report on further consequences, give additional examples of remarkable escapes and eyewitnesses’ statements, provide some more technical detail and discuss potential future effects and measures. Summing up, the extensive reporting related to the Tay bridge disaster covers almost four and a quarter of the five columns on the respective news page and is visually separated from the remaining news items on that page by a bold horizontal dividing line. It can be considered an early example of the package approach, as various textual components, all

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related to the main event, are subsumed under the major headline FALL OF TAY BRIDGE and clearly distinguished by nine individual heads25 which provide an orientation for the reader. Although chronology is still an important organization principle, not only within the individual parts, but also in their overall arrangement, we can already observe clear traces of a top-down approach. By providing a combination of factual reports, feature- and list-like components, a comprehensive picture of the events is created, which satisfies the readers’ appetite for more than just the dry facts. It is certainly not surprising that this example occurred in one of the popular Sunday papers, which are commonly considered as favouring elements of drama and personal presentation (cf. e.g. Berridge 1978: 257). Yet, a more detailed investigation of the macro-structural organization of news reporting in RNC-2 will have to show where exactly the roots of the modern package approach can be located.

3.3 Linguistic realization—conversationalization Defining ‘conversationalization’ The term ‘conversationalization’ has been coined by Fairclough in his ground-breaking works in Critical Discourse Analysis. Relating to modern media discourse, he postulates two major tensions: that between information and entertainment and that between public and private (1995: 10). The reshifting of the boundaries between public and private, he argues, leads to a “modelling of public discourse upon the discursive practices of ordinary life” (1994: 253). Conversationalization is a complex phenomenon, which—with respect to newspaper discourse—denotes a preference for conceptual orality, i.e. communicative immediacy, in a written medium (cf. Koch/Oesterreicher 1985). In defining its scope, Landert/Juckert’s (2011) differentiation of various dimensions of “public” and “private” proves beneficial, which includes the communicative situation (i.e. the scale of public accessibility),

25 Interestingly, these heads themselves provide evidence of a transition process. They are clearly not just ‘headings’ in Schneider's sense (2002: 169), as they do provide some information on the content of the section to follow. They are neither cross-heads, as the parts represented by them are not just paragraphs of a single news story, nor are they fully-fledged headlines, as the parts are still clearly related to each other and subordinated to the main headline, which is graphically marked by larger type.

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the content (i.e. the scale of privacy), and the linguistic realization (i.e. the degree of linguistic immediacy). As indicated in Table 3.2, conversationalization involves the dimension of content, as “the private lives of public figures are treated as news in the popular press”, as well as the dimension of linguistic realization, as there is a “shift in style towards private, conversational, language” (Fairclough 1994: 261). In this section, the focus will be on linguistic manifestations of conversationalization, i.e. traces of the ‘language of immediacy’. Clearly, there is also an overlap of conversationalization and the other phenomena outlined in Table 3.2, most notably personalization, another multi-faceted concept. One of its essential components is the creation of solidarity26 with the reader by adopting a tone highly reminiscent of faceto-face conversation (cf. also Brownlees 2005: 80). From Oesterreicher’s (1997) differentiation of eight types of orality, a major distinction regarding orality in newspaper language can be derived. Firstly, there are phenomena which Oesterreicher describes as “mimesis of immediacy or simulated orality” (1997: 205). These cases “normally do not reflect spontaneous or natural language but functionalize select features of linguistic immediacy” (1997: 206).27 Secondly, Oesterreicher refers to real “records of spoken transaction” (1997: 202-203). In newspaper discourse, this comprises, for example, direct quotations, which might actually display varying degrees of conceptual orality. Conversationalization in the mass media is often considered a phenomenon of the late twentieth century (cf. e.g. Fairclough 1994: 261, and also Hundt/Mair 1999: 225, who refer to this phenomenon as “colloquialisation”). Yet, as shown in section 1.4, it was already at the age of New Journalism that contemporaries noticed (and often decried) a tendency for “the literalisation of spoken slang” (Lee 1976: 130). Operationalizing conversationalization Linguistic traces of conversationalization in written news discourse can be observed at various levels of language. On the micro-level, it involves lexical and grammatical choices and also graphic representations of phonetic and prosodic aspects of language. On the macro-level it includes pragmatic phenomena such as the use of certain speech acts, aspects of 26 Due to the fact that this solidarity is artificially created and, from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis, considered as highly manipulative, Fairclough (2001) terms this phenomenon “synthetic personalization”. 27 This links back to the use of the attribute “synthetic” in Critical Discourse Analysis.

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discourse organization and certain patterns of colloquial genres (cf. Mair 2006: 188ff, Fairclough 1994: 260). As Table 3.4 shows, micro-level features have been thoroughly described in the renowned multi-feature approach by Biber and his colleagues, which has been praised as “generally valid as well as quantitatively precise” (Steen 2003: 115). Of the seven factors originally postulated by Biber (1988: 102-103), Dimension 1 (informational vs. involved production) appears central with regard to conversationalization. As pointed out by Brownlees, “[g]enerally speaking, the more informational the discourse the more likely that text will approximate writing, and, vice versa, the greater the interactive, affective element the closer the text will be to oral discourse.” (2005: 70). Additionally, Dimension 3 (elaborated vs. situation-dependent reference) and Dimension 5 (non-impersonal vs. impersonal style) prove particularly relevant. Table 3.4 provides a summary of the features indicative of communicative immediacy. In their 1997 study, Biber/Finegan apply the multi-dimensional approach in a diachronic investigation of various genres including news discourse. Based on ARCHER, they find that news reportage, as one of the popular registers “appealing to an increasingly wider readership across the centuries”, first became conceptually more written, “but then reversed this trend in the most recent periods” (1997: 269), displaying increasingly more features of conceptual orality. The quantitative, multi-dimensional approach has been taken up in various studies. For example, Westin (2002) uses it to investigate the development of newspaper editorials in the twentieth century. Based on CENE (see section 2.1), she finds that the language of editorials in three up-market dailies “became more informal but at the same time more compact and precise, in so far as the complexity of the noun phrases increased and the use of markers of vagueness and uncertainty decreased” (Westin 2002: 160). She also postulates a tendency for shorter sentences, less subordination and a less narrative style, whereas reporting and argumentative functions have remained stable. A similar approach is also taken by Steen (2003), who sees this quantitative approach as a useful complement of the qualitative perspective taken in Critical Discourse Analysis which typically relies on individual case studies. Steen’s study is based on an automatic analysis of a smaller, 85,000-word corpus of Times editorials (1950-2000). He considers the increased use of involved and persuasive style markers as clearly indicative of conversationalization (2003: 122).

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Phonetic/prosodic features x Eye dialect x Emphasis via graphemic means (caps, italics, etc.) x Inclusion of verbal information on prosodic aspects

Smaller pragmatic units x Naming practices x Speech acts, esp. directives x Interjections

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MICRO-LEVEL Lexical-grammatical patterns Biber (1988) – relevant features: x Tense and aspect: Present tense x Place and time adverbials x Pronouns and pro-verbs: 1st and 2nd ps. pronouns, pronoun it, demonstrative and indefinite pronouns, pro-verb do x Questions: Direct WH-questions x Stative forms: be as main verb x Subordination features: WH-clauses, sentence relatives, causative adverbial subordinators, (past participial WHIZ deletions, conditional adverbial subordinators) x Prepositional phrases, adjectives, and adverbs: Attributive adjectives, total adverbs x Lexical specificity: Type/token ratio, word length x Lexical classes: Hedges, amplifiers, emphatics, discourse particles x Modals: Possibility modals x Reduced forms: Contractions, subordinator that deletion, stranded prepositions x Coordination: Non-phrasal coordination x Negation: Analytic negation

List extendable, e.g.: x Lexical repetition x Parenthetical structures MACRO-LEVEL Discourse Colloquial genre organization patterns x (Simulated) turnx Representation/ taking: Adjacency simulation of spoken pairs genres x Topic development

Table 3.4: Features of conversationalization As pointed out, studies in the fashion of Biber’s approach focus on the distribution of certain lexical classes and lexico-grammatical features, i.e.

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those micro-structural phenomena which lend themselves to automatic searches. They have certainly provided valuable insights into the development of news language. Yet, one should not forget that the sets of features proposed by Biber (et al.) are not exhaustive (and thus not “generally valid”), but can and should be adopted, e.g. to comprise genrespecific features.28 Clearly, the automatic search excludes many features of conversationalization from analysis. Take, for example, the use of ‘eye dialect’, i.e. spellings mirroring a certain non-standard pronunciation. In the modern press, this is a quite prominent phenomenon, used particularly in the headlines of modern popular papers. Yet, the use of eye dialect can be traced back to the seventeenth century (cf. Brownlees 2005: 82, who provides an example from a 1650 newsbook), and it can also occasionally be observed in the RNC. Example (3), where an Irish accent is imitated (though not consistently), illustrates how non-standard spellings (here in bold type) can add up to the humoristic effect of anecdotes and contribute to the stereotypization of referents. 3) THE QUEEN WINS IRELAND’S LOVE AND BETTER HEALTH THROUGH HER IRISH SOJOURN [...] Ireland certainly suits the Queen. Everybody is saying how wonderfully well she looks—fresh and bright and alert, with a quick eye for every peasant who stands bare-headed by the roadside, and a sympathetic interest in the welfare of all the homely warm-hearted folk who, for the first time for so many years, are taking care of their Queen. [...] “An’ that proves,” said the carman, with Hibernian logic, “that if she had always lived here she would have been a wonderful healthy ould lady.” I submitted that her Majesty’s health was rather wonderful as it is. “Yes, that’s thrue,” he replied, “but if she had always lived in Ireland she would not have required to come to Ireland to improve it.” (RNC-1, 1900 Daily Express)

But also among the features which are included in Biber’s work, there are restrictions in processability. For example, with regard to questions, the focus is exclusively on wh-questions, as other types could not “be accurately identified by automatic analysis in spoken texts” (Biber 1988: 227) and were thus also not investigated in written texts. However, Claridge, in her investigation of questions in the Lampeter Corpus, points out that particularly declarative questions and elliptical questions 28

Cf., for example, Ungerer’s (2006) review of Westin’s (2002) study.

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contribute to a colloquial, oral tone, “making the discourse sound less formal, more down-to-earth” (2005: 139). Claridge’s work also demonstrates the benefits of combining the quantitative approach with a close-up qualitative investigation, as she finds, for example, that the different distribution of questions across the different domains of the corpus are to a considerable extent related to individual stylistic preferences (2005: 141). Finally, insights into the pragmatics of questions can obviously only be gained by considering the cotext and contexts of question tokens, and thus moving to a macro-level approach. As indicated in Table 3.4, conversationalization manifests itself in a range of macro-level phenomena. These include the use of certain speech acts, particularly directives, which normally require some kind of response from an addressee, and whose targets and functions can be fruitfully described from a pragmatic perspective. Quite frequently, such speech acts are (elements of) first-person quotations, which further contribute to the conversationalization of news discourse (see below for a discussion of RNC-based research results). Naming practices are another device to be mentioned here, particularly the use of informal terms of reference which can create solidarity, show discrimination or provide moral evaluation. This includes, for example, bare surnames, first names, short forms, nicknames and colloquial kinship terms (cf. Bös 2007 on naming practices in modern newspapers), but also abusive terms, which Conboy considers as one of the “hallmarks…of popular journalism” (2002: 36). Schneider (2002: 154) indicates that informal terms of the former kind have developed in the twentieth century, whereas evidence of the latter can already be found in the 1700 sample of RNC-1 (2002: 117). Yet, macro-level research naturally moves beyond the speech act level to include larger units such as (simulated) patterns of turn-taking reminiscent of everyday conversation and colloquial genre patterns such as narratives (cf. Fairclough 1994: 260) and (more or less faithful) representations of spoken discourse. Probably the most prominent example of the latter are the comprehensive court reports with extended dialogic sequences featured by Victorian newspapers. These, in turn, often include embedded quotations of non-institutionalized, everyday conversations, e.g. between a murderer and his victim. Summing up, the combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches as well as the adoption of micro- and macro-level perspectives can provide more precise insights into the forms and functions of selected features, and grants the researcher closer access to the original discourse. It is, therefore,

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an indispensible complement to the large-scale perspective provided by quantitative multi-feature analysis. The next two sections will place selected features of conversationalization under closer scrutiny.

3.4 Selected features of conversationalization under closer scrutiny Micro-level phenomena: A case study of first- and second-person pronouns First- and second-person pronouns are commonly considered to be indicative of involvement and have been used in a range of studies on spoken and written genres (cf. Biber 1988: 225). The following case study investigates the use of the pronouns I, we and you across the time samples of RNC-1 and thus nicely complements the investigations on seventeenth century news discourse carried out by Brownlees in Chapter 1, 3.2, and also Facchinetti’s research on pronoun usage in internet blogs (Chapter 4, 6.3.2). The quantitative results for RNC-1 are summarized in Table 3.5. 10 9 8 7 6

I

5

we you

4 3 2 1 0 1700

1730

1760

1800

1830

1860

1900

1930

1960

2000

Table 3.5: First- and second-person pronouns in RNC-1 (per thousand words) Table 3.5 indicates varying tendencies. Whereas the use of I has (almost) steadily and quite substantially increased, there are wave-like developments regarding the use of we and only a mild increase in the use of you, which is generally quite rare in the corpus. Thus, on first sight, there seems to be no clear trend for the expression of involvement via

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pronouns. Yet, the qualitative investigation of the data shows some similarities in the usage of the three pronouns. Starting with I, Table 3.5 shows that there are two outliers (1760, 1860) which interrupt the linearity of the increase, but can easily be explained by looking at the specific occurrences in the respective years. In 1760, 28 out of the total 35 instances of I occur in an address by the AUTHOR cum EDITOR, Bingley, to his readers. Example (4) provides an extract from this very special case. 4) [...] Hoping therefore for the favour and protection of the Public, I now offer that Paper to the world, under the title of Bingley’s Journal, or the Universal Gazette: and by this name, for the future, it will be continued as a Weekly Paper. The reader may depend on the most faithful and authentic account of all occurrences, without any disguise, misrepresentation or party view whatsoever; for, as the only rational end of such a paper is to set every thing that passes in the world, in a true light, I conceive it would be much better for the world to receive no account at all of these matters, than to have them related in a false and partial manner. [...] (RNC-1, 1760 Bingley’s Journal)

Similarly, in 1860, the distribution of I across the six papers representing the period varies drastically. 106 of the total 203 instances are found in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, whose usage of 10.6 per thousand words (ptw) thus contrasts strongly with the average of 3.55 (ptw) in that year. The lowest frequency was found in the Evening Standard (0.9 ptw). Turning to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, we find that 102 of the 106 instances are concentrated in one article: a comprehensive murderer’s confession of a capital crime (cf. (5)). 5) The confession ran as follows:“The murder did not take place in the dell hole; it was done on the side of the road where the struggles were stated to have taken place.” Here he showed how he attacked his wife; the governor standing by the prisoner he brought his right arm round the back of the neck, and placed his right hand over the governor’s mouth, and then said, “It was in this position it was done; I done it with my left hand. A short interval elapsed after I gave her the first wound; it was done from here to here (at the same time passing his fingers from his ear to his throat). As soon as she found she was wounded she said, ‘I’ll punish you.’ She was standing up at the time I did it; I seized hold of her the second time and entered the knife under her ear, and thrust it in the direction of the windpipe. (This, no doubt, was the wound that caused death.) As soon

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as she had received the second wound she said, ‘Joe, you have done it at last!’ [...] (RNC-1, 1860 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper)

A close-up on Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, which is possible with RNC-2, shows that in comparison with the decades before and after, 1860 indeed was an outlier (cf. Table 3.6), and that individual texts can distort the average figure. 12

First-person singular pronoun

10 8 6 4 2 0 1842

1850

1860

1870

Table 3.6: First-person singular pronoun I in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (per thousand words) Yet, zooming up even closer, we find that also the individual parts of news reports are characterized by changes in perspective. Going back to the Tay-Bridge disaster (outlined in example (1)), it is obviously not surprising that occurrences of I are concentrated in one particular part of the report: an eye witness’ statement (cf. (6a)). What is interesting, though, is that the usage varies from that of other eyewitnesses’ accounts (e.g. (6b)), which are written from a third-person perspective and thus have a considerably different effect as regards immediacy29. 6a) STATEMENT BY AN EYE-WITNESS. The following is a statement as to the accident by an eye witness:—“I was seated by my fireside on Sunday night, listening to the clamour of the storm without, when a blast of wind more furious than before caught the chimneys of a house almost opposite and brought them down to the ground with a crash that startled every one of us to our feet. Stepping over to the casement I gazed out upon the street, and just 29 What is also interesting, and appears somewhat contradictory, is that the eye witness in (6a) remains anonymous, but reports in first-person perspective in contrast to the eye witness in (6b) who is explicitly named and receives further characterization (profession, status, etc), but is not given a voice in first-person quotations.

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then a blaze of moonlight lighted up the broad expanse of the Tay down below, and the long, white, sinuous line of the bridge came to view. I don’t know how it was, but I instinctively took out my watch. It was exactly seven o’clock. ‘The Edinburgh train will be due immediately,’ I exclaimed to my wife, ‘come and let us see whether it will attempt to cross on such a night.’ [...] 6b) THE SIGNALMAN’S STORY. The story of Barclay, the signalman at the south side, is in substance as follows:—Just before entering the bridge at the south end a junction is effected with a second line which comes from the eastward connecting Tayport and places in that direction with the main Tay bridge route to the North British system. A few yards to the north of where this junction takes place the signal cabin for the southern end of the bridge is erected. It stands at a considerable elevation on the north side of the bridge, and is built in fact on the first span that extends from the south shore. In this cabin, as usual on Sunday afternoon, the signalman Thomas Barclay had taken his post some time before the south train was due. When he went upon duty Barclay says it was blowing quite a gale, which with every passing minute seemed to increase in strength and volume. After he had entered his box Barclay was joined by a foreman surfaceman named Watt, who was induced, owing to the exceptional severity of the evening, to keep his friend company in his elevated and somewhat exposed situation. (RNC-2, 1880 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper)

Additionally, examples (5) and (6a/b) also illustrate how important it is to consider variation with regard to points of reference (cf. also Brownlees, Chapter 1, 4.2). In historical newspaper communication, there are four major communicative parties involved: the AUTHOR/EDITOR, the CORRESPONDENT, the REFERENT (i.e. the people involved in certain news events) and the READER.30 All of them are found to be points of selfreference in the corpus, yet obviously in different frequencies31 and with a clear shift across times (cf. Table 3.7).

30

Since the early days of news writing with their typical AUTHOR cum EDITORconstellations, newsroom procedures have become increasingly more complex, involving a rising number of professionals. In order to account for cases of multiple authorship, AUTHOR/EDITOR are mostly represented as one entity here (cf. Bös 2009). Similarly, we have to keep in mind that the work of CORRESPONDENTS, whose identity was usually clearly visible in early news correspondence, has increasingly become subject to editing processes. 31 As the focus of the RNC is on news reports, self-reference to READERS is actually uncommon. There is one exception, in which the writer of a letter

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100%

Miscellaneous cases

90% Referents

80% 70%

Author/Editors and Correspondents

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1700

1730

1760

1800

1830

1860

1900

1930

1960

2000

Table 3.7: Use of first-person singular pronoun I in RNC-1 (in per cent) Table 3.7 shows that, in the eighteenth century, first-person singular references were typically made by the AUTHOR/EDITORS and CORRESPONDENTS, whereas from 1830 onwards, I was typically used by REFERENTS, i.e. in first-person quotations, which are discussed in more detail below. One might expect a similar shift in the use of the first-person plural pronoun we. However, as Table 3.8 indicates, the turning point to quoted REFERENT material occurred later in the corpus. With 87.1%, the use of we by AUTHOR/EDITORS and CORRESPONDENTS was still quite frequent in 1900, dropping to 16.6% in 1930 and even further to 0.7% (i.e. one case) in 1960. This sharp decrease is certainly related to the more clear-cut distinction of news report and commentary—an ideal purported in the period of New Journalism (cf. Lee 1976: 121).

identifies himself “I am, Your constant Reader, George Hanoverian” (1730 Penny London Post), yet in fact he takes over the (double) role of a CORRESPONDENT.

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100% Miscellaneous cases

90% 80%

Referents

70%

Author/Editors and Correspondents

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Table 3.8: Use of first-person plural pronoun we in RNC-1 (in per cent) Yet, a more differentiated investigation shows that functional shifts of we have occurred much earlier. Generally speaking, we find exclusive as well as inclusive uses of the pronoun. There are exclusive references to the newspapers under investigation (represented by the AUTHOR/EDITORS), and also to other newspapers from which extensive parts were reproduced verbatim. Likewise, CORRESPONDENTS’ letters often feature exclusive we, and exclusive we also occurs in first-person quotations by REFERENTS. Of course, we is also used inclusively, uniting the communicative parties, e.g. AUTHOR/EDITOR and CORRESPONDENT, AUTHOR/EDITOR and REFERENT, and, very important from the perspective of personalization, representatives of the newspaper and READER. Finally, original material by the AUTHOR/EDITORS (including reproductions from other papers) and CORRESPONDENTS, just like quotations by various REFERENTS also contain instances, in which we is used in a generic sense, i.e. referring to “people in general”, or rhetorical sense, i.e. “in the collective sense of ‘we—the nation’” (Westin 2002: 43-44), as illustrated in (7) and (8), respectively. 7) The dry weather we had for some days enjoyed ceased last night towards 12 o’clock (RNC-1, 1860 Times) 8) the opinion we entertain in England (RNC-1, 1800 Times)

In the eighteenth century, we was typically used in (more or less) formulaic patterns as a framing device, providing reference to the information process (cf. also Brownlees, Chapter 1, 3.2.1). For example,

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the collocation we hear is most prominent in the eighteenth-century samples, ranging from 32.5% of all instances in 1700 over 42.4% (1730) to 33.9% (1760). In 1800, the use drops drastically to 7.4% and to nil thirty years later. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, we is not only used in less formulaic patterns, but also in more generic and rhetorical functions (see (7) and (8) above) and more argumentative functions, showing the stance of the newspaper. Quite often, the formulaic patterns are extended by evaluative modifications, as illustrated in (9) and (10), and the AUTHOR/EDITORS clearly position themselves, as in (11 – 13). 9) We are glad to hear (RNC-1, 1800 Times) 10) We are extremely happy to inform the public (RNC-1, 1800 London Evening Post) 11) We are afraid that some of our readers, of a less sanguine temperament than our own, will begin to imagine that in our anticipations we have “mounted our high-horse;” but we think the most sanguine will concede to us our facts, and in that case we will very cheerfully leave them to draw their own conclusions. (RNC-1 1830 Manchester Guardian) 12) [We have reason to think that this statement is well founded.] (RNC-1, 1830 Manchester Guardian) 13) [We know better. – Ed. of the Literary Gazette] (RNC-1, 1830 Times)

Example (11) nicely illustrates not only how the newspaper presents itself, but also that it does not necessarily need a direct form of address to establish contact with the READER. Here, third-person references provide a bond with individual readers, who are singled out by ascribing to them a positive character trait (sanguinity) and excluding less sanguine ones— a quite effective way of claiming common ground. Examples (12) and (13) both parenthetically comment on the veracity of a previous statement. Example (13) constitutes one of the rare cases where the point of reference is mentioned explicitly. However, there is a quite substantial number of referentially vague cases, which leave room for interpretation. Thus, the corpus repeatedly contains the collocation we hope (and variations thereof), which, depending on the context and the potential attitude of the (model) READER, oscillates between exclusive and inclusive usage. Due to the fuzziness and the highly interpretative nature of functional categorization, it is difficult to provide precise quantitative results (cf. also Westin 2002: 44). As pointed out before, the second-person pronoun you is generally rather uncommon in RNC-1. It is most frequently found in quotations, where it typically addresses one or more (CO-)REFERENTS involved in

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certain newsworthy events. There is a clear rise in this usage from 1830 onwards (cf. Table 3.9).32 1.4

1.2

Author/Editor and Correspondent (Co-)Referent

1

Reader

0.8

Generic

0.6

0.4

0.2

0

Table 3.9: Targets of second-person pronoun you in RNC-1 (per thousand words) Regarding AUTHOR/EDITORS and CORRESPONDENTS as targets, early and modern newspapers in the corpus show two different major constellations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the EDITOR is typically addressed by the CORRESPONDENT (cf. (14)). 14)

Extract of a letter from St. Kitt’s, Dec. 6. By the time this reaches you, you will have received, I suppose, all particulars relative to the recapture of St. Eustatia, by the French. [...] (RNC-1, 1800 London Evening Post)

Obviously, the CORRESPONDENT addresses his letter directly to the EDITOR of the newspaper. Yet, as the letter is made public (and the CORRESPONDENT is aware of this purpose), most of these examples can, in fact, be considered as cases of multiple address, including the readership (cf. also Schneider 2002: 145). Rather rarely, the reader is explicitly included as a third party in the communicative constellation (cf. (15)). 32

Again, the 1900 sample is an outlier. Here, you is mainly documented in various interrogations and letters related to a specific court case covered particularly in the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror.

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FROM A CORRESPONDENT. The following particulars respecting the accident at the Thames Tunnel I hope your readers will find interesting. [...] (RNC-1, 1830 Standard)

The cases documented in the 1960 and 2000 samples are mainly remnants of interview situations, in which you is addressed by the REFERENT (the interviewee) to the CORRESPONDENT (the interviewer). Often, these examples show strong traces of pragmaticalization (cf. Claridge/Arnovick 2010: 165), as in the cases of if you like, you know, formulaic patterns, which, for instance, constitute nine out of the ten respective instances in the Daily Mirror 2000. Direct references to the READER have slightly increased, but generally remained rather rare. Again, the comparably high amount of readership address in the 1960 Daily Mirror is an exception, as all the instances occur in a borderline case of soft news and advice to the reader. Yet, the high frequency there indicates that other newspaper genres (such as the evergrowing advice sections) would certainly deliver much clearer evidence of reader involvement. What has clearly increased in the twentieth century is the generic use of you. As example (16) illustrates, this usage occasionally leaves room for the readers to identify themselves as a specific target. 16) Once there used to be an idea that a pub was a friendly place where anyone was welcome and people mixed. The way things are going nowadays, you soon won’t be able to get into some pubs without a visa. (RNC-1, 1960 Sun)

Summing up, the development of the three pronouns investigated in this case study shows that (as might have been expected) in the early newspapers of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, involvement via pronouns is mainly related to the typical correspondence style of news reporting. From the Victorian Age onwards, first- and second-person pronouns manifest themselves mainly in the ever-growing number of quotations (see below). There, the immediacy of real speech events is reproduced, and the pronouns feature the multiple perspectives of the participants in news events. Additionally, as the newspaper market diversified, the newspapers turned away from formulaic patterns and positioned themselves more clearly. Additionally, the increasing professionalization at the time of New Journalism (including, for example, the ideal of objectivity in news reports and the use of new journalistic techniques like the interview) triggered

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further changes in the distribution and functions of first- and secondperson pronouns. Finally, Table 3.10 shows the distribution of first- and second-person pronouns in quality and popular papers. Although the average number of these pronouns in the qualities has always remained below that of the populars, a clear and relatively stable differentiation can only be made out in the twentieth century samples. 20

Quality candidates

18

Popular candidates

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1700

1730

1760

1800

1830

1860

1900

1930

1960

2000

Table 3.10: Distribution of first- and second-person pronouns in quality and popular candidates in RNC-1 (per thousand words) In the eighteenth century, the distribution of pronouns in what has been characterized as quality and popular candidates by Schneider (2002: 83) shows no clear trend. This lends emphasis to the need of further research regarding the popular-quality qualification of early newspapers. In the 1700 and 1760 samples, some differences are noticeable, whereas the distribution in the 1730 and 1800 samples is relatively similar. Interestingly, in the quality candidates33 of that century, the occurrence of these pronouns is almost exclusively reserved for the use of we by AUTHOR/EDITORS and CORRESPONDENTS. There are only five exceptions where you is used, I never occurs in eighteenth century quality candidates. It is also this specific usage of we that triggers the perceptible rise of first- and second-person pronouns in 1830 and also the remarkable similarity regarding quality and popular candidates in the nineteenth century. With 5.7 occurrences (ptw), the 1830 qualities even outnumber 33 Schneider (2002: 83) classifies the following newspapers as quality candidates of the eighteenth century: Daily Courant, London Gazette, and Gazetteer.

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the populars (3.25 occurrences ptw) in the use of we. Additionally, in 1860, also I (typically used by the CORRESPONDENTS) gains more prominence. From 1900 onwards, AUTHOR/EDITOR and CORRESPONDENT are no longer as visible via the use of first-person pronouns in the qualities (Times and (Manchester) Guardian). This is why we can observe the clear decline at the turn of the century. As already made clear in the detailed discussion of the individual pronouns above, the risk of special cases distorting results must not be underestimated. Research on the extended data base of RNC-2 will help to validate the findings. Macro-level phenomena: The use of imperatives Just as first- and second-person pronouns, the use of directive speech acts can contribute to a high degree of conceptual orality. Thus, they have, for example, been considered as “a one-sided conversational exchange between author and reader” (Flesch 1949: 94-95). My investigation of imperatives in RNC-1 (Bös 2009) has shown that their use actually goes beyond that. I documented six different combinations of speaker- and addressee-roles in the corpus, involving not only the AUTHOR/EDITOR and the READER, but also the REFERENTS (2009: 123). REFERENTS posed their directives not only via authentic quotations, but were also ascribed a voice in faked versions. Similarly, as a special part of audience design, READERS were given a voice in simulated quotations. Formal and functional patterns varied according to the source of the imperative. Prototypical ‘ordinary’ imperatives directed to a secondperson addressee were mainly observed in quotations mirroring spoken interaction. There, they typically functioned as non-textual calls for action with varying degrees of illocutionary force. It is certainly important to remember that the functions of quoted imperatives are not characteristic of news reports as such. However, their representation obviously creates a stronger immediacy of the news report, and their illocutionary force may even be extended beyond the original speech situation. Particularly in headlines as ‘stand-alone-units’ (Bell 1991: 187), speakers and addressees are often deliberately kept unclear and can only be disambiguated by considering the context, thus creating the reader involvement desired (cf. (17), a headline from the 2000 sample of the Sun). 17)

Let’s have a role over in the hay! (RNC-1, 2000 Sun)

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AUTHORIAL/EDITORIAL material featured fewer ordinary imperatives, but showed a formal preference for let-constructions which were quite frequent in the corpus (Bös 2009: 119). There, imperatives were mainly used with text-related functions (e.g. as expository directives), and in many cases their directive force tended to be rather weak or even nonexistent. Imperatives were generally quite rare in the eighteenth century, the first instances in the corpus being documented in the 1760 sample. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, imperatives in the AUTHORIAL/EDITORIAL material mainly functioned as comments and textstructuring devices. It was only in the middle of the twentieth century that imperatives, as pieces of (pseudo-)advice from the AUTHOR/EDITOR to the READER, became popular attention getters in the headlines. In line with common expectations, this function was most prominent in the popular paper, whereas in the qualities, imperatives were less frequently used and rather applied in text-related functions. The use of quotations As indicated by the exemplary discussion above, features associated with conceptual orality are often tied to quotations in news discourse. Yet, as Oesterreicher (1997: 197) points out, “written versions of spoken discourse cannot automatically be identified with language of immediacy”, but can also represent language of distance. In my research on quotations in RNC-1 I therefore focussed on what I call first-person quotations, i.e. those cases of (real or simulated) direct speech presentation which play a role in the specified and individualized representation of social actors (cf. Bös 2010a: 68). Even more relevantly within the context of conversationalization, in Bös (2010b), I concentrated on dialogicity as one of the major characteristics of extreme communicative immediacy (cf. Koch 1999: 401). Clearly, the use of first-person quotations has massively increased in the past three centuries. Almost doubling from period to period, it started out from ten instances in 1760 (pointedly used in humorous anecdotes) and arrived at 964 instances in 2000 (cf. Bös 2010b: 230). Yet, the use of first-person quotations in dialogic patterns was not as linear. A particular peak of dialogicity could be observed in the mid-nineteenth century. The Victorian papers contained lengthy sequences of court room discourse and police interrogations, which represented the typical question-answer sequences in much vivid detail. This is aptly illustrated by example (18), which even comprises information on prosodic aspects and the non-verbal

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behaviour of the audience. In socio-historical perspective, this specific feature of Victorian newspapers seems to mirror the pronounced interest in the massive changes of the legal system at that time (cf. Shore 2004: 381), but it is obviously also tied to increasing commercialization and the fact that crime proves a safe staple of reader attraction. 18) Mr. Twyford: Is that allowed in Whitfield Chapel? Constable: No, your worship. Mr. Twyford (to the prisoner): What have you to say to the charge? Prisoner (vehemently): Why, sir, they are utterly wrong there, and there is no man in this nation who can set them right except meņ (laughter). Mr. Twyford: Oh! that is enough; I am quite satisfied. Prisoner (in a much louder tone): I shall speak a little more “plainer” yet, sir, not only to this nation but to every other nation, I shall make them hearken unto meņ(laughter). [...] (RNC-1, 1830 News of the World)

In contrast, quotations came to be used more selectively towards the end of the century. Again, this can be related to the new wealth of material, as technology and professionalization in the field advanced. Accordingly, longer dialogic sequences were reduced to one turn or even to incorporated quotations due to space constraints. This allowed for a more pointed presentation of individual perspectives, yet, it also increased the potential of de- and re-contextualization, which has been critically viewed in Critical Discourse Analysis. In modern newspapers, the interactivity of the original speech event has become rather neglected. Still, there are various (real and simulated) examples, which—as a first part of an adjacency pair—trigger the reader to complete the sequence. Again, this is a particularly effective device of reader involvement in headlines (cf. (19)). 19)

Hello, do you remember me? (RNC-1, 2000 Daily Mail)

Summing up the findings from the micro- and macro-level analyses presented in this section, some major shifts regarding the dimensions of interactiveness crystallize. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as long as letters were still a dominant format of news reporting, interactivity manifested itself mainly on the level of AUTHOR/EDITOR – CORRESPONDENT communication, occasionally (implicitly) involving the READER as well. A major shift occurred when quotations gained prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. Then, interactivity concentrated mainly in REFERENT – (CO-)REFERENT communication. The decreasing dialogicity of quotations was counterbalanced by a growing emphasis on the

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AUTHOR/EDITOR – READER level, mirroring the trend for increasing (synthetic) personalization postulated for the twentieth century. As Facchinetti will show in Chapter 4, the advent of the internet has taken reader involvement into completely new dimensions. Again, the model of news communication needs to be readjusted, as with unmediated news reporting, the boundaries between AUTHORS and READERS are irretrievably blurred.

4. Conclusions The discussions in this and also in the previous chapters have shown how corpus design relates to the possibilities of analysis and consequently influences the findings one is able to make. Thus, although the internet provides easy access to ever-growing collections of historical news data these days, this does not make principled corpora superfluous, as tedious as their compilation might be. In his summary, Fries points out the necessity of extending the ZEN Corpus. The same is true for the RNC. An extended corpus basis will provide us with more reliable results and help us to avoid being misled by outliers tied to special cases. Ten-year intervals will allow us to locate the origins of innovative journalistic practices and to sketch trends more precisely. For example, as regards popularization processes, the nineteenth century appears to be a particularly interesting phase of transition. RNC-2 will help us to investigate the effects of diversification and commercialization from the early Victorian age to the time of New Journalism, and recognize precursors of popular journalistic practices common today. Yet, corpus size alone does not matter. We have seen the drawbacks of just relying on huge corpora and computerized research, which limit analysis to automatically identifiable features and prevent researchers from being able to keep close to their material. Thus, research in the historical development of news discourse will most benefit from a cooperation of scholars, from using different data bases and combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Additionally, we need to profit from interdisciplinary perspectives, which help us to gain more profound insights into the complex reasons for the linguistic developments in news discourse.34

34 For evidence of the fruitful attempt to bring together scholars and researchers from various fields, see, for example, Media History 20:1 (2014) and Journal of Pragmatics special issue 15:2 (2014) which present the results of the research cooperation “Exploring the language of the popular in American and British newspapers 1833-1988” led by Martin Conboy (2010-2012).

CHAPTER FOUR NEWS WRITING FROM THE 1960S TO THE PRESENT DAY ROBERTA FACCHINETTI

1. Introduction Journalists—the gatekeepers of information, the filters of facts, the safeguarders of truth, the manipulative eye, the interpreting voice. Different names for the different roles of the blue and white collar workers of the information enterprise. In this onomasiological plethora one aspect is generally agreed on as universally constant: ‘Journalism is information’ and news reports encode this tenet par excellence. Indeed, the language of news is supposed to be first and foremost factual. Yet, over the last fifty years of news writing, a number of scholarly studies have shaken this tenet to the root, by detecting in news reports not only the objectivity of facts, but also the subjectivity and the emotive shades of their interpretation.1 These studies have illustrated, for example, how subtle headlines may be in indicating the writer’s angle, how lexico-grammatically ambivalent reports prove to be and finally how peculiarly diversified intros are when the point of view of the journalist comes into play. The subtleties of news writing have been further refined by fifty years of technological advancements treading the world of communication at a giant’s pace, which have strongly impinged on the information enterprise and have become a fertilizing campus for the strategic intertwining between news reporting and news interpreting. Starting from an overview of such technological changes, this chapter will illustrate how they have been affecting the news enterprise and the language of journalism and how the study of newspaper writing in 1

For an updated overview of such studies, see Peters (2011); for a discussion of the idea as well as the practice of journalistic objectivity, see Blaagaard (2013).

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particular has evolved over the last fifty years. Indeed, new topics of analysis have been developed, along with the compilation of news databases. When illustrating such databases, I will also provide a few caveats pertaining to the exploitation of corpora for news-related studies and for linguistic studies in general.

2. Fifty years of news reporting As highlighted by Bös in Chapter 3, the seeds of the current technological age were mostly sown in the nineteenth century with the birth of the telegraph; by allowing newspapers to receive and distribute information much faster than before, that paved the way for the birth of news agencies, from Reuters in London to Wolff in Berlin and Havas in Paris. Reuters’ founder had started his news services with carrier pigeons; the pigeons were soon substituted by fast sailing yachts, in turn abandoned in favour of telegraphic lines, which Reuters itself built to join Germany to England and France to the United States. And in so doing, the need for information dissemination facilitated the spreading of technology. The propelling thrust to news dissemination given by the telegraph was paralleled in the twentieth century, particularly in its second half, by a set of concomitant causes: increasing industrialization and urbanization, rise in adult literacy, and further technological developments. Indeed, the radio in the thirties and commercial television between the fifties and the sixties were greeted by consumers as a great development in the world of communication, although for newspaper editors and publishers it could have been a great danger adumbrating their extinction. But newspapers knew that shunning this new invention would be a mistake destined to turn back on them; so, they endorsed both the radio and the TV and ‘went broadcast’, shrewdly winking at commercials as a profitable source of income and survival. The 1960s were the years of change, of transgression, of defiance of tradition, of enterprise. They were the first years of photojournalism, when camera enhancements made taking pictures easier and improved the quality of photos, mostly thanks to high precision lenses, electronic flash, and auto-focus. The sixties were the years of firsts: the development of the first home video recorder, called Telcan; the marketing of the first successful Minicomputer; the launch of the Telstar satellite, allowing for the first trans-Atlantic radio satellite broadcast; the first prototypes of video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, and hypertext; and, finally, in 1969, the launch of Arpanet, the research-oriented prototype of the Internet. That was just the beginning of a new era.

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At the same pace set by the sixties, the seventies increased the list of firsts, and gave birth to digital cameras, record moving videos as well as still photographs; personal computers and portable phones were developed in those years and, most of all, the first fiber-optic cables transformed the communications industry, by permitting transmission over long distances and at higher bandwidths than any other form of communication. The world of news reporting heralded real time journalism and all sorts of facts started to hit the headlines around the globe at the blink of an eye. Between the seventies and the eighties, technological inventions were like fireworks sparkling continuously all over; cable TV became more accessible and, consequently, more popular; the general public had regular direct access to information, thanks to TV, radio, and the Internet, which was moving its first steps. Moreover, colour was introduced in print and the majority of newspapers turned to ‘offset’ presses, thus being able to reproduce photos with higher fidelity and with better quality. All this paved the way for the so-called ‘Information Age’ of the nineties and of the first decade of the new millennium; by now the Internet has imposed itself in the world arena and new media have proliferated. By the early days of the 21st century, all newspapers were using full colour extensively. Then came a new media platform, the Internet, and its birth, with the proliferation of information sources and criss-crossing interconnected networks, has changed the way information is gathered and assessed to the point that “the audience relationship with the news is transformed from passive to active, enabling them to contribute, challenge and correct the journalism” (Lee Wright 2010: 76). In the UK, the era of internet news was opened by the website of the Daily Telegraph in 1994, followed in 1997 by the BBC;2 they were the pioneers of the online newspapers’ trade, which has now reached an unprecedented pace. These have been the years of the World Wide Web, of instant messaging, of cell-phones which on the one hand get smaller and smaller while on the other hand comprise an outstanding number of communicative facilities. E-mail and SMS have become so popular as to be the standard forms of interpersonal communication, while TV portals are now paralleled—and challenged—by free Internet video portals. The way Harrison (2008: 46) sees it, it is not that a new medium replaces and outruns the others, but rather that “each platform carries different aspects of the story to ensure cross-promotion and retain reader/viewer interest. In this way the three platforms (television, web and 2

In 2004 the Daily Mail was the last major UK national newspaper to launch its website.

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newspaper) seek to reinforce each other.” But has such abundance of (unmediated) online news actually changed and increased the news content? With reference to mainstream news outlets, it seems that this is not the case; a study carried out by Rennen and Witschge (2010) proves that “the content of mainstream news outlets is largely the same, with different outlets—often with a very different ethos and editorial stance—using identical quotes, images, and very similar text. Further, the news angles provided are often similar. These sites paint, for the most part, a one-dimensional picture of online news homogeneity” (Rennen and Witschge 2010: 184).3 What is by now unquestionable, however, is that information spreading and retrieval has gone ‘global’; indeed, everything seems to be ‘global’ now, if a random internet search of words collocating with this term provides the following diversified results:4 -

global change global climate global cooling global coverage global database global development and climate change agenda global emissions global food output global politics global targets global warming global water resources

From climate to politics, from informatics to economics, from food to militarization, the term ‘global’ touches on virtually everything, including the ‘global coverage’ of the world of information:

3 Rennen and Witschge (2010) also remark that technological advancements have not changed much the way news is presented, since the emphasis of mainstream news sites is still largely on text, with limited use of multimedia, although the visual is given more emphasis. 4 The search was carried out by means of the linguistic search engine Webcorp on June 30, 2011 and the collocations quoted here reproduce the first screenshot of the output results. WebCorp (http://www.webcorp.org.uk/) has been developed by Research and Development Unit for English Studies, at Birmingham City University and currently allows for collecting and processing large sections of the web; the results are visualized in concordance lines.

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in regard to media, the development of technology among others plays a key role for media development. The extension of fibre-optic cable systems, of satellite links, of Internet communication networks, and the deregulation of telecommunications systems, have theoretically made it possible to bypass the borders of nation-states that have traditionally exercised regulatory powers over media institutions. Indeed, the trend appears to be toward greater internationalization of media systems. ‘Global communication’ and ‘information superhighway’ are the buzzwords of this age. Technological developments enable a greater, faster and facilitated distribution of information around the globe. The reduction or elimination of traditional institutional and legal barriers has facilitated the spread of global media. (Mickenbecker 2004: 13)

In Britain, the new age gained ground also thanks to Rupert Murdoch’s challenging and shrewd ‘deployment’ of News International titles to Wapping and his concomitant adoption of new printing technologies.5 ‘Traditional’ journalists and media pundits thought that technology would aid journalism but declared the death of true journalism, laying the blame on a different attitude to news reporting and newsgathering. In 2010 the British Journalism Review even hosted a poem by Martin Bell titled “The death of news”: News-chasing then, we’d hit the airport running, Often in just the clothes that we stood up in, With everything to gain, nothing to lose, A way with words and ‘certain rat-like cunning’ Was all it took, said our Nick Tomalin. And what we did looked, read and felt like news. But though the new technology abounded, The adventure ended, quietly and discreetly, On someone’s orders—none of us knew whose— The death knell for real journalism sounded, When health and safety did for it completely, It died and was replaced by pseudo-news. (…) What’s missing is the authenticity, The being there which is the heart of news. (Bell 2010)

Former BBC foreign correspondent Martin Bell mourns the passing of authentic, old-fashioned news-chasing, the death of real journalism despite the help provided by new technological advancements. Yet true journalism

5

A detailed account of ‘the Wapping revolution’ can be found in Conboy (2010: 142-145).

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may not be dead, if we bear in mind the phone-hacking scandal which involved Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World6 and that led to its closing down after 168 years of continuous publication. Without touching on the ethics of journalism raised by Bell in “The death of news”, no doubt, news writers are different from fifty years ago, a fact largely due to new technological improvements and the (consequent) changes in circulation, sales, and readership numbers for print editions of newspapers. In 2006 all this even led the Economist to name journalists an “endangered species” in a leading article entitled “Who killed the newspaper?” (Economist, 24 August 2006, accessed on July 31, 2011). True, unmediated journalism and the success of the Internet have resulted in a great challenge for survival for all print newspapers, the British ones being no exception. An overview of aggregate circulations of national daily and Sunday titles in Britain between 1965 and 2007 carried out by Franklin (2008: 8) shows a dramatic decline in the circulation of newspapers (cf. Table 4.1). Franklin records an overall loss of 15.8 million copy sales representing 41 per cent of the market (2008: 9). Such a trend has not altered after 2007; indeed, on June 17, 2010, Robinson published the news that UK newspapers had “suffered the most dramatic circulation declines of any country outside America since 2007”, reporting a UK circulation fall of 25% since 2007 (Robinson 2010). Such a trend has been further confirmed in a report published by The Economist on 17 August 2013, according to which the most obvious change in the past few years is the decline of “physical” products, such as CDs, DVDs and print newspapers. In 2008 nearly nine-tenths of consumer cash went on them; by 2017 it will be a little over half, with digital grabbing the rest.

6

The News of the World was founded on October 1, 1843, as a broadsheet. In 1984 Rupert Murdoch turned it into a tabloid, the Sunday sister paper of The Sun. For over a century it had one of the greatest circulations in the UK, but it was then destroyed by its own unorthodox frenzy to hit the headlines at all costs. Indeed, on July 4, 2011, the news broke that nearly a decade earlier a private investigator hired by the newspaper had intercepted and deleted the voicemail of missing British teenager Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered. The paper was also alleged to have hacked into the phones of families of British service personnel killed in action. Amid public outrage, the political and legal implications of the phone-hacking scandal led to the closure of the paper on July 10, 2011.

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In turn, Thurman (2013) advocates that we are now moving in the direction of a differentiation between online and print readership; specifically, his comparative study of the domestic and overseas consumption of UK national newspaper brands across their print editions and online channels up to 2011 shows that in terms of popularity, the print channel accounts for a majority of domestic daily readers, while the online channel has largely increased newspapers’ daily overseas audience. The drop in circulation (and the diversification of audience) have been accompanied by measures to minimize costs (a) by cutting back both on staff and on internal newsgathering capacities7 and (b) by changing the format from broadsheet to ‘compact’ (430mm width, 280mm height) or ‘Berliner’ (470 width, 315 height) on the part of most quality newspapers.8 However, these are not the only changes that have affected news journalism over the last five decades; quite differently from the early days of news reporting, when news was the epicentre of the newspaper (cf. Brownlees, Chapter 1), present-day news “coexists with many other forms of content: photos, graphics, features, television guides, motoring information, columns, fashion pages, lifestyle articles, cartoons, crosswords, sport and so on and must sit aside advertisements” (Harrison 2008: 39). Understandably, as remarked by Conboy, “there is a clear market logic in the response of newspapers who are keen to incorporate letters, reader-driven features and User-Generated Content and to sharpen the specifics of their lifestyle appeal in order to maintain reader loyalty in an era of media fragmentation” (Conboy 2010: 136).

7

Yet Freedman (2010: 41) remarks that the Guardian has recently employed new staff to face the extra demands of online news. 8 On September 30, 2003 the Independent pioneered this latter trend; the Guardian did not follow immediately, as it thought it more impellent to focus on the development of its website into a converged, multi-platform publication.

152 Newspaper title Daily Mirror Daily Record Sun Daily Star Daily Express Daily Mail Total popular / mid-market Daily Telegraph The Times Guardian Independent Financial Times Total quality TOTAL all papers

Chapter Four Circulations (in 1,000s) 1965 1985 4,957 3,252

–

–

1,361

4,065 1,435 1,875 1,828 12,455 1,221 480 483

– 3,981 2,425 12,724 1,352 258 276

–

–

152 2,038 14,762

229 2,417 14,872

2007 1,554 404 3,043 778 765 2,294 8,838 894 636 371 245 452 2,598 11,436

Table 4.1: UK daily newspapers circulations 1965, 1985, 2007 (Franklin 2008: 8). Recalling changes in content and reporting strategies that show newspapers’ shifting priorities, Franklin (1997: 4-5; 2008: 14-16) focuses first of all on their reduced concern for reporting news and, secondly, on their increased preference for op-eds; the editor of the Independent has even dubbed his newspaper a “viewspaper” (Franklin 2008: 15). At present, when reporting news, quality papers focus more on celebrities than they used to do in the past, a time when they shunned such practice as more apt for tabloids. These changes in content have been paralleled by changes in format and style, with quality papers using “tabloid-style banner headlines, alliterative and punny headlines, large print, less text, shorter words, bigger pictures, colour pictures and more of them” (Franklin 1997: 7; 2008: 15). Pictorial journalism has equally changed for tabloids and broadsheets; indeed, in the present visual age, display has increasingly gained importance for the readership. So, broadsheets have heeded this requirement as well, thus contributing to reduce the gap between quality papers and red-tops. Indeed, “computerised production technology allowing for the use of informative graphics and improved printing techniques vastly improving the quality of pictures reproduction meant the ‘serious’ press took display as seriously as the tabloids” (Cole 2008: 190). Despite this, McCabe remarks that British broadsheets have not got more similar to tabloids in terms of use of photography in newspapers; in contrast The

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Times, the Independent and the Guardian have all even reduced the “screaming front-pages that they used to display in the nineties” (McCabe 2008: 193). Finally, the cut back on staff levels has also led to a more limited number of home and foreign correspondents on the one hand and the increasing power of press agencies as news referents and “wholesalers of news” (Manning 2008: 262) on the other. This has reached the point that the Press Association has become “the UK’s monopoly reporter” (Aspinall 2005: 2) and “the UK media’s trusted source of news and information”, with “unrivalled reputation as a fast, fair and accurate multimedia content provider” (PA website, accessed July 27, 2011). Journalists, rarely leaving their offices, make ample use of cost-effective pre-packaged news stories, which however may hinder the possibility of validating and verifying stories. No doubt, technological advancements have spurred a dramatic change in news making and news writing. In actual fact, at present, the word ‘writing’ itself may be outdated, in so far as news runs through ‘wires’ other than the old-fashioned pen; indeed, the Internet and a set of social networks strongly affect the news world as well: online news media, 24h news cycles, citizen/civil journalism and public relations are blurring the boundaries between traditional forms of news journalism and public communication (Deuze 2008), to the point that 21st century news is now “a collective and organizational product” (Lams 2011: 1857) whereby the process of text creation results from a number of steps where the journalists/reporters and their editors are only part of the process; indeed “it crucially involves the recontextualization of multiple news discourses (a corporate press release, interview notes, news archive material, prior knowledge) into a single narrative, framed as an authoritative, unified account of a new event” (Van Hout, Pander Maat et al. 2011: 1883-1884). Unquestionably, we have come a long way from the early seventeenth century corantos and newsbooks (cf. Chapter 1, Section 1) and also from the 20th-century newspapers, whose newsrooms teemed with editors and subeditors. We are now in the era of unmediated journalism.

3. Social networks and unmediated news reporting News transmitted via social media sites is the typical example of unmediated journalism. Every single news update reaches us in the form of a(n instant) message; once the message has been received, if we intend to read on, we click on the link, widen up the scope of our knowledge and may also reply by providing further data easily accessible to everybody.

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This ‘real-time reaction’ allows for instant feedback—that may be replies or re-tweets—which turns the once ‘one-to-one/few’ e-mail communication into mass communication. Thus, social media place us on a live microphone, or even camera, all the time; they may be both intimate and broadcast; we can use them to contact one person or send a manifesto to millions and ‘expose’ ourselves by using the same forum both for public and for private business. This is their key difference from institutional, mainstream forms of journalism, of news reporting and news making: social networks are unmediated. Clear examples may be drawn from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and YouTube, all based on internet platforms. Twitter, launched in 2006, is the SMS portal of the Internet, offering a social networking and micro-blogging service which enables “its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user’s profile page” (Twitter website) in reversed chronological order and posted via a range of technologies such as mobile phone, instant messaging clients and the web. Twitter has been the main communication channel among Iranian protesters in the aftermath of the 2009 elections and one of the most exploited communicative tools for news-sharing in the 2011 Arab spring as well. In contrast, when Facebook was launched in 2004, it had not been intended for exchanging news, though now it connects millions of people around the world and helps to share information on any topic; indeed, at present over 750 million active users exploit this social network to exchange messages which are also news-related; yet the specificity of personal profiles set up on Facebook tends to produce opinionated texts, rather than actual breaking news updates. In turn, blogs are the epitome of unmediated journalism; they can be opened by professional journalists and by ordinary citizens, thus leading to the so-called ‘citizen journalism’ of the web, which anybody can read and which can uncover mines of information. In the blog arena, the most basic unit is the ‘post’, an individual message, frequently a comment to a previous post, logged in by a submitter with identifiable date and time of logging and—like tweets—presented in reversed chronological order on the blog page. Overall, as highlighted by Reese, Rutigliano et al. (2007), “traditional online news sites differ in structure from the weblogs, using the story as the basic unit, updating and changing these stories from one hour to the next. These story units do not accumulate as do posts on weblogs. They do not typically embed links to other stories in the site’s own archive” (Reese, Rutigliano et al. 2007: 244).

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Finally, YouTube is an unmediated web TV, a worldwide video-sharing community where the participants—be they professionals like CBS and BBC or amateurs—upload any sort of video clips. The website was created in February 2005 and now witnesses a massive circulation of news-related videos; by means of the ‘video-response’ option specific of YouTube, YouTubers can post videos to reply to and comment on previously posted videos, in the same way as they can post replies to other posts on a blog. However, while the interaction on blogs takes place largely via textual discourse, on YouTube dialogue is by means of video clips. Hence, any sort of material, including news stories, can be constantly updated and integrated with further details, which are first and foremost visual, but which may also include—as they frequently do—spoken and written language, sounds, and music. Alongside social networks, a further form of non-institutional news dissemination rose to fame between 2010 and 2011: WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Assange. This organization publishes leaked documents supplied to it anonymously by its media partners and so far has shaken the strongholds of world powers—mostly American—by publishing detailed records of the Afghan and Iraq wars, classified American diplomatic cables and records from the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, but also on extrajudicial killings in Kenya and on toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast, among others. In the fast-changing world of journalism, Wikileaks and social networks are now already considered ‘traditional’ and have themselves started to be exploited by other ‘professionalized’ social media platforms dedicated to journalism. This is the case, for example, of news aggregators like Storyful (https://storyful.com/), a social media news agency born in 2010, which works with news organisations from all over the world to discover and verify content across the social web. Other online news servicesʊlike the online journal Journalism Reseach News (www.journalismresearchnews.org), created in 2015ʊhave been born out of the collaboration with academic and professional institutions and gather the news of events, research, and projects, out of people’s feedback; they make large use of Facebook, Twitter and of other recently born social news magazines like Flipboard, information agencies like NowPublic, and social networking news sites like Fark. All these professional and non-professional news-related sites constitute what Craig (2011: 143) calls “the landscape of independent and community journalism”. Craig even draws a map of such landscape, including details on their relationship with mainstream news organizations and their purposes:

156 Organization / activity

Smaller mainstream news organizations (connected with newspapers, TV, radio outlets) Online-based journalism ventures— community or specialty, profit or non-profit Citizen news sites

Chapter Four Place of citizen versus professional journalist in activity Professional primary / citizen secondary

Professional usually primary, but citizens may play key role Citizen primary, but professional may play key role

Independent blogs

Varies depending on the blog

Independent users of social media

Citizen primary

Cooperative activity?

Has a public purpose?

Yes

Yes

Yes, including interaction with citizens

Yes, though may focus on particular issues Yes

Yes with interaction among citizens Yes, including interaction with citizens Yes but may be very informal

Varies

Varies

Table 4.2: The landscape of independent and community journalism (Craig 2011: 144). Once again, if journalism is first and foremost information, as remarked in Section 1, journalism is anywhere where there is news and now, unlike 50 years ago, it is no longer the exclusive domain of media companies, of a few professionals, but is also produced by anybody, without any required professional mediation.9 Interestingly, all these sites are by now no longer second-rate news producers and deliverers (if ever they have been considered such); on the contrary, they are given the full status of ‘journalism’. Moreover, they are so entrenched in the news enterprise that they have been officially included in the news cycle for breaking news stories:

9

In-depth critical discussions of the power of online (citizen) journalism can be found in Hall (2008), Beckett (2008), Fenton (2010) and Viviani (2014), among others.

News Writing from the 1960s to the Present Day Medium Daily newspaper

Radio news

Broadcast TV networks and affiliates Cable TV news networks

Publish/present when? Next morning for morning papers, same afternoon for afternoon papers Hourly; biggest stories immediately Morning and evening shows; biggest stories immediately Often immediately / within minutes

Publish/present what? Full story

Increments (may include headline, short story, then longer) Full story; Increments for big stories Often increments

Online: larger mainstream media

Often immediately / within minutes

Often increments

Online: smaller mainstream media

Immediately / within minutes on big stories; others may follow newspaper or broadcast cycle Varies depending on citizen reporters’ availability; may be immediate Varies depending on availability; may be immediate Immediately

Increments for big stories; more developed story for others

Online: citizen journalists

Online: independent bloggers Independent users of social media

Increments using social media; often more developed story otherwise Increments

Increments

157

Handling speed and accuracy Confirm information from sources before reporting Confirm information; may not initially on big stories Confirm information; may not initially on big stories Confirm information; may not initially on big stories Confirm information; may not initially on big stories Confirm information; may not initially on big stories

Varies depending on standards

Varies depending on standards Varies depending on standards

Table 4.3: The news cycle for breaking stories (Craig 2011: 29).

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In such a news cycle, independent users of social media are even classed as the only ones who always and exclusively provide breaking news ‘immediately’, while even professional online larger mainstream media do not always do so.10 Increased coverage, visibility, and credibility further legitimizes the full right of independent and community journalism (and of the general public) to assess the degree of trustworthiness and accuracy of mainstream professional journalism. The result is merciless, as illustrated in the report of The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released in Washington on September 12, 2009 (Kohut, Doherty et al. 2009) on the public evaluation of the news media between 1985 and 2009. The report shows that the degree of faith in professional journalism has drastically decreased over the last few years; the general public largely remarks that news stories are often inaccurate, that news organizations try to cover up their mistakes, and that the press is less and less professional, as shown in Table 4.4 from the Report:

Table 4.4: Increasing criticism of press accuracy, openness (Kohut, Doherty et al. 2009). Moreover, mainstream journalism is criticized for being more and more biased, not politically independent, prone to be influenced by powerful people/organizations and inclined to favour one side, as shown in Table 4.5, once again from the Report:11 10

As shown in Table 4.3, Craig writes that large mainstream media deliver breaking news “often immediately / within minutes”. 11 A comparative research authored by Hanitzsch and Mellado (2011) on the perceived importance of influences on news work in 18 countries throughout the

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Table 4.5: Views of press bias, fairness, independence (Kohut, Doherty et al. 2009). The research has found further confirmation in a more recent document published online in 2013 by the same Centre, testifying to the fact that news organizations are still largely criticized with reference to their degree of accuracy, bias, and news judgement, as follows:

world does confirm that journalists themselves perceive the influence of political and economic factors, although the degree of perception differs strongly depending on the national context. Moreover, economic influences seem to have a stronger impact in private and state-owned media than in public newsrooms and they are not related to a country’s economic freedom. In Hanitzsch and Mellado’s words: One can easily see that journalists in Western countries perceive political and economic influences to be of smallest significance. Australia and Spain, however, deviate considerably from this cluster, while journalists in Brazil, Bulgaria, Indonesia, Mexico, and Romania already seem to be relatively similar to their colleagues in the West. Two groups of countries are significantly different from the majority of societies: journalists in Turkey and China similarly reported the strongest political influences, whereas Uganda and Chile exhibit the highest scores in terms of economic influences. (Hanitsch and Mellado 2011: 416)

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Table 4.6: News Organizations criticized for accuracy, bias and news judgement (Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/, accessed on June 28, 2015). Such negative opinion is so widespread that it has even spurred the writing of books and pamphlets to safeguard the profession, to claim that it is under attack and to reassert the ‘excellence’ in journalism: While bad news and opinions about journalists spread rapidly, good journalists at hundreds of large and small news organizations strive for excellence in the face of growing financial pressures and often shrinking resources. (Craig 2011: 5)

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It is neither the aim nor the scope of this chapter to take a stand in what has by now become a tug-of-war between professional and independent journalism; it is true, however, that the first and foremost outcome of new internet-based communication networks is that news consumers have now a much broader and diverse selection of news sources than ever before; news organizations are only one of such sources and, most of all, they cannot control the flow of news coming from the other channels. This is a key feature of this new news environment, a feature that must be heeded not only by mainstream news organizations, but also by media pundits in general, as well as—it goes without saying—by the political establishment. As such, online unmediated news-related communication systems compete for ‘authority’ with mainstream journalism by redeploying the news content across a broader area than the one once reserved for journalists (Reese, Rutigliano et al. 2007) and by altering the journalistic backstage and frontstage in so far as the ordinary citizen is more and more visible and active (Karlsson 2011). In a special issue on the future of news published by the Economist on July 9, 2011, Tom Sandage writes: For consumers, the internet has made the news a far more participatory and social experience. Non-journalists are acting as sources for a growing number of news organisations, either by volunteering information directly or by posting comments, pictures or video that can be picked up and republished. (…) Readers can also share stories with their friends, and the most popular stories cause a flood of traffic as recommendations ripple across social networks. Referrals from social networks are now the fastestgrowing source of traffic for many news websites. Readers are being woven into the increasingly complex news ecosystem as sources, participants and distributors.

This change in the news making process and output has led scholars to add at least two new variables to the content and methodology of their studies: (a) ‘citizen journalism’ as to the authorship of news and (b) ‘the Internet’ as to the channel of communication. Professionals are no longer the only ones to gather, edit and report news; amateurs, called by the media critic and journalist Rosen (2006, accessed July 27, 2011) “the people formally known as the audience”, now challenge mainstream news organizations. Indeed, Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, a news website in the vanguard of integrating news with social media, remarks that people “don’t just consume news, they share it, develop it, add to it—it’s a very dynamic relationship with news” (quoted in the Economist, special report on “The news industry”, July 9, 2011). As

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such, social media are of help in the ‘deterritorialization of news’, whereby “the user, creator and news subject need no longer share the same national frame of reference.” (Reese, Rutigliano et al. 2007: 236-237) and in the process of what Chouliaraki calls “technologization of democracy” (Chouliaraki 2010: 227). The blurring of the boundaries between professional and amateurial journalism, between news and non-news spaces, between news reception and news production necessarily affects language and its study as well. No doubt, journalistic jargon is still heard in professional newsrooms;12 the journalese that somehow reunites two worlds by now not so far apart— tabloids and broadsheets (cf. Chapter 3, Section 1.5)—can still be traced in professional news publications; and editors still play their role in shaping and moulding the political slant of their papers. Yet now ordinary citizens do make their voices heard as well and their language is the language of the general public, from different professional backgrounds, with the most diversified ages and social extractions, and from the most distant corners of the world. All kinds of variation are somehow levelled out in the Internet arena, which has now turned into a real-time daily paper, where news hits the screen every single second. Bearing this in mind, in the following sections of the present chapter I will focus on the corpora currently available and exploited by scholars to study news-related language and on the different studies that can be carried out on such language, bearing in mind the new background against which it is now set.

4. News-related computerized corpora When corpus-based studies took their first steps, corpora were compiled in a relatively balanced way so as to cover equally a set of textual categories, frequently including news reports. This applies to the ‘BROWN family’ of corpora, the first set of computerized corpora to be made available, starting from the BROWN corpus itself, which distinguishes between ‘Informative’ and ‘Imaginative’ prose and places the textual types ‘Reportage’, ‘Editorials’ and ‘Reviews’ under ‘Press’, as follows:

12

Journalistic jargon has gained importance not only via glossaries that can be found online and illustrate the meaning of this specific terminology, but also with reference to the translational needs of prospective and practising journalists, since it becomes more and more cogent to enable them to communicate and work together with their foreign homologues (Facchinetti 2014, 2015).

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A. Press: Reportage Political

Daily 10

Weekly 4

Total 14

Sports

5

2

7

Society

3

0

3

Spot News

7

2

9

Financial

3

1

4

Cultural

5

2

7

Total

44

B. Press: Editorial Institutional

Daily 7

Weekly 3

Total 10

Personal

7

3

10

Letters to the Editor

5

2

7

Total

27

C. Press: Reviews (theatre, books, music, dance) Daily 14

Weekly 3

Total 17

Table 4.7: Distribution of the Press samples in the BROWN corpus. Social networks did not exist yet and news reporting relied exclusively on professional institutionalized journalism. Hence, all the texts in the BROWN corpus, published in 1964, are edited English prose printed in the United States in 1961. The text samples are 2,000 words each, for a total of 88,000 words of press reportage. Exactly the same distribution, thus allowing perfect comparison of data, occurs in the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus, its British counterpart made available in 1976, with 44 extracts of ‘Press reportage’. Similarly, in order to allow for data comparison, the Freiburg-LOB corpus of British English (F-LOB) and the

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Freiburg-Brown corpus of American English (FROWN)13 cover the same number of extracts, 44 each, with texts published in 1992. These latter corpora, first released in 1999, match the two original ones as closely as possible in size and composition, to ensure comparability between the BROWN family and to allow direct analysis on ongoing changes in British and American English. Hence, like the original BROWN and LOB corpora, FROWN contains the same amount of news reports. Through the decades, the British branch of the BROWN family has also produced BLOB-1931 and British English 2006 (BE06). The former, previously called the Lancaster-1931 or B-LOB Corpus, covers texts published thirty years earlier than those recorded in BROWN and Frown. Its design mirrors exactly the plan of the other corpora, since it covers a total of ca. 1 million words from the years 1928–1934.14 This allows for comparisons particularly in terms of British English newspapers as to how the language has evolved from 1931 (BLOB) to 1961 (LOB) and 1991 (FLOB). In turn, BE06 is so called because up to 82% of the texts were published between 2005 and 2007,15 thus the median sampling point is 2006. The corpus has the same total amount of words and sampling frame as the LOB and F-LOB corpora. Interestingly, all the texts were taken from internet sources, though previously published in paper form as well; indeed, the online news archive LexisNexis is the corpus source for the Press genres Reportage, Editorials, and Reviews. This exploitation of internet sources in the latest addition of the BROWN corpora testifies to the shift in attitude of the compilers, who have by now come to terms and complied with the latest technological breakthroughs. Moreover, unlike the other BROWN corpora, BE06 does not include 2,000 word extracts randomly taken within the chosen texts, but rather specifically selects evenly-sized text samples at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of each text.16 Last but not least, with special reference to news reports, the compiler Paul Baker has “tried to put together full sets of multiple articles that came to approximately 2000 words in size when added together” (personal communication, July 2011). Hence, news reports being relatively shorter than 2,000 words, whenever the 2,000 words were not 13

Originally called by its compilers W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kuþera “The Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English”. 14 Thus it centres on 1931, hence its name. 15 The remaining 18% were published in 2003–2004 and early 2008. 16 Baker (2009) clarifies that BE06 breaks down as follows: 37% beginnings of texts, 26% middles of texts and 5% ends of texts. Additionally, 32% of the files contain full texts.

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reached, other subtexts were added starting from the beginning. This is of great value to linguistic studies, considering the specificity of news reports, where the intro of a text contains in nuce the great bulk of the story and is indeed the most important section of the text. In conclusion, as summarized in Table 4.8, the BROWN family of corpora allows, at least for British English, interesting comparisons across thirty year time spans covering almost a century of news reports from different sources: American

British

Decade

BLOB-1931

1931

BROWN

1961 LOB

FROWN

1961 1991

FLOB

1991

BE06

2006

Table 4.8: The BROWN family of corpora. While the BROWN family ensures linguistic analysis of short- and mid-term diachronic changes in news writing, the International Corpus of English (ICE) allows for similar analyses from a diatopic perspective. Not all components are available yet from the many standard varieties of English originally in the plan; however, the potentialities of this project in terms of cross-linguistic and cultural studies of the language of news are indeed huge. True, every single component of ICE covers only 20 press news reports (as for the BROWN family, each sample being 2,000 words long) and the number of samples is relatively low, but they all date between 1990 and 1993, so they may well integrate FLOB, to provide more representative data on the news reports in the last decade of the previous century. Moreover, they are certainly an excellent research resource for anybody intending to study the language of news from a cultural point of view, so as to identify if and to what extent news reporting changes from one variety to the other of the same language. To this aim, at present, we also witness a boost in the compilation of parallel/translational corpora of news-related texts encompassing more

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than one language; hence, for instance, at the University of Louvain and Poitier a reciprocal corpus of English-French journalese has been developed17 as a new independent project; the PLECI Corpus (PoitiersLouvain Échange de Corpus Informatisés) covers a well-defined set of newspapers from the years 1991-2005, as follows: Original French

Original English

Translated English

Translated French

Figure 4.1: Structure of the Computerised Corpus of English-French Journalese.

The corpus is both paragraph- and sentence-aligned and at present it contains c. 600,000 words of English texts translated into French and c. 700,000 words of French texts translated into English; its 4-way possibility of data comparison allows it to function both as a translation (parallel) corpus and as a comparable corpus. Interesting data can be gleaned from corpora like PLECI with reference to ethno-linguistic studies of the language of news and of journalism in general, so as to identify which features are cross-cultural and typical of the news-genre and which others are more-culture-specific, also for the purpose of translation studies. Be they monolingual, bilingual or multilingual, over the last ten years, thanks to technological advancements, huge databases have been compiled that cover full issues of newspapers and magazines from different years and decades; the databases, uploaded on a CD-ROM or on the web, and analyzable by means of dedicated search tools, are rich in resource potential not only for linguists, but also for journalists, sociologists and anybody interested in the media. This is the case of the TIME Corpus, devised and compiled by Mark Davis, and covering over 100 million words of texts from the TIME magazine, published between 1923 and 17 This corpus is part of the PLECI (Poitiers-Louvain Echange de Corpus Informatisés) joint project between the University of Louvain (CECL) and the University of Poitiers, aiming to collect a large English-French translation corpus. The PLECI corpus is made up of two parts: bi-directional journalese and bidirectional novels.

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2006. The TIME corpus is related to COCA, The Corpus of Contemporary American English, covering more than 450 million words, with texts, spoken and written, from 1990 to 2011. The corpus is also regularly updated, increasing by twenty million words each year (Davies 2010: 448). Since its full flow of data covers every single year, it is more apt to detect gradual linguistic changes than the BROWN family of corpora, which are spaced thirty years apart and consequently “do not have the ‘granularity’ needed to see intervening changes” (Davies 2010: 448). This features of an even and regular distribution of data through the years and decades is not shared by any other corpus available so far. For example, Wordbanks online, which covers 550 million words, mostly includes texts dating from between 2001 and 2005. Among other textual types, Wordbanks also includes a number of news-related texts and, as claimed on its website, is “carefully designed to reflect a balanced snapshot of how language is used today”. The compilers also remark that “these corpora are constantly updated with new data from a wide variety of sources such as newspapers, magazines, websites, journals, books, television and radio. International, national and local publications are included to capture a broad range of subject matter and style.”18 Indeed, the great bulk comes from the language of news. Yet it is hard to understand whether such a ‘news’ heading covers news reports, news features or commentaries. This makes it difficult to judge the positivity of the corpus for any type of linguistic analysis. Indeed, the downside of Wordbanks, as of most of the corpora covering the category ‘news’ among their textual types, is that it is difficult to glean what type of news-related texts are covered, since the world of news is undoubtedly multi-faceted. Following the technological developments, the last decade has seen a change in corpus compilation as well, with the development of multimodal corpora alongside the more ‘traditional’ ones. This is the case of the Image-Nuclear News Story Corpus (INNSC), compiled by Caple (2009) and covering the image nuclear news stories19 (INNS) of the daily broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald published between June 2004 and August 2008, for a total of 1317 stories. INNS are news reports whereby “a press photograph is combined with only a heading and a brief caption rather than an extended news report” (Caple and Bednarek 2010: 212). For the purpose of the corpus and of the author’s project (2009), every single INNS has been tagged for unique identification; hence, any story and its related tagging can be accessed both in the 18

The data are drawn from the website of Wordbanks online: (http://www.collins.co.uk/page/Wordbanks+Online, accessed June 28, 2015). 19 The phrase has been coined by Caple (2006).

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database of news stories and in the image archive. Moreover, information about the stories has been stored in an electronic relational database management system that allows retrieval of a number of encoded data concerning the news event, caption details, and images. All this provides data for a fruitful set of intersemiotic analyses of news discourse, with specific reference to related images and captions.20 In turn, the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) includes audio/video files of texts of Scottish English, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, alongside interactive maps, and the orthographic transcriptions of the spoken data synchronized with the audio or video source. At present, the corpus covers a total of 4 million words dating between 1945 and 2007; 80% is writing, among which ‘Reports’, which, however, are not actual news reports, since they are mostly from the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. Once again, the term ‘news’ has been somehow imprecisely exploited, and the linguist runs the risk of being misled by the terminology used. A possible way out of the trap laid by a misleading terminology may be found in ‘unstructured’ databases, which are simply repositories of all the issues of magazines and dailies, or in search engines like GLOSSANET, run by the Centre de traitement automatique du langage (CENTAL), which allows for the creation of one’s own personalized corpus. Indeed, the search engine lets the researcher carry out searches in every published text on the Internet in the form of RSS feeds, including press, media, and blogs. By specifying a RSS publication list, the researcher registers a query, the system analyzes these sources and will search some keywords or expressions that the scholar has specified. Since the service works in every language, it is also possible to compare data between and among languages. Unstructured corpora and search engines thus enable the scholar to be responsible for their own selection and to be fully aware of the choice of data they have made. This applies not only to print corpora but also to spoken and broadcast ones, particularly with reference to news reporting. The majority are released by the Linguistic Data Consortium; this is the case of 2006 NIST Spoken Term Detection Development Set, compiled by researchers at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and containing eighteen hours of Arabic, Chinese and English broadcast news, alongside English conversational telephone speech and English meeting room speech. In turn, Datasets for Generic Relation Extraction (reACE) 20

See Caple and Bednarek (2010), as illustrated in Section 6.2, but also Caple (2008, 2009 and 2010), among others.

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was developed at the University of Edinburgh, and consists of English broadcast newswire and broadcast news material from ACE 2004 Multilingual Training Corpus LDC 2005T09 and ACE 2005 Multilingual Training Corpus LDC2006T06. The data sources were collected by LDC in 2000 and 2003 and consist of a number of English-language news sources: ABC, Agence France Presse, Associated Press, Cable News Network, MSNBC/NBC, New York Times, Public Radio International, Voice of America and Xinhua News Agency. Finally, the English Gigaword Fifth Edition is a comprehensive archive of newswire text data that has been acquired over several years by the LDC at the University of Pennsylvania up until December 2010. The seven distinct international sources of English newswire included in this edition cover The English Service of Agence France-Presse, Associated Press Worldstream, Central News Agency of Taiwan, Los Angeles Times/Washington Post Newswire Service, Washington Post/Bloomberg Newswire Service, New York Times Newswire Service, and Xinhua News Agency. Undoubtedly, the number of computerized news-related corpora has increased so much since the release of the first generation of the BROWN Corpora that some kind of regularization is now needed. In the first place, as previously mentioned, the present situation calls for clearer terminology when qualifying a corpus as a ‘news-(related) corpus’ or as comprising news data; in the second place, we are strongly in need of a repository of text descriptors for contemporary data like the European Database of Descriptors of English Electronic Texts, which is currently under development for historical databases thanks to the work of Diller, De Smet and Tyrkkö (2010). Such repository intends to “guide individual researchers through the existing repositories and enable them to create their own task-specific corpora which they can balance according to their own needs and for whose composition they are individually responsible. Such corpora would benefit from an openly available, systematic, and peer-reviewed set of descriptors, all the while meeting the requirements of individual research projects” (Diller, De Smet et al. 2010: 29). I believe a similar repository should be devised for contemporary corpora as well; in its simplest version, with reference to news-related texts, it would definitely facilitate the identification of sources for linguistic analysis sifting among different types of news-related texts, so as to distinguish, for example, also between business news, court-reporting, death news, and many other types of news that are not only text-specific but also contentspecific.

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5. Researching news-related corpora: Caveats The database of textual descriptors can be of great use for any newsrelated study because it allows us to judge if and to what extent a corpus that ‘claims’ to cover the language of news is truly reliable in this respect. Yet, down to the core, the reliability of a corpus lies largely in the precision of the compiler(s). This is even more evident for the three main pillars of textual types within journalism: news reports, features, and commentaries. Indeed, news reports—of the narrative type—are structured quite differently from leading articles, which are clearly and notoriously of the commentary type. The British component of ICE does cover the category Press News Reports; yet, at a closer look, not all articles subsumed under this category pertain to it. Let us consider Figure 4.2:

Figure 4.2: Screenshot of text W2C-008:4, coded as a news report in ICE-GB.

This article was originally published by The Times on November 9, 1990 and, as indicated in Figure 4.2, has been codified by the compilers as “Printed reportage: press news reports”. Here is the text itself as reported in the corpus: Well met in Moscow; Leading Article Mikhail Gorbachev's meeting yesterday with Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation , came none too soon. Economic dislocation has reached the point at which insubordination could turn into revolution, as yesterday's extension of rationing in Moscow emphasised.

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While one republic after another opts out of the empire, taking discontented Russian minorities with them, the economy is regressing into a hotchpotch of autarkies. Can Mr Gorbachev still save the Soviet Union? Even Mr Gorbachev's most reliable friends in the West, the Germans, now doubt whether foreign help can affect Mr Gorbachev's fate, let alone that of his domain. Economic stabilisation must therefore come about by the Soviet leadership's own efforts.

The very qualification “Leading article” in the second line of the text, along with the connotative lexicon and rhetorical features, clearly point to a commentary. Thus, a linguistic study aimed at news reports separately from commentaries, of which op-eds are a subcategory, would rely on untrustworthy data. A second example is provided by the following sample, still codified as a “news report” in ICE-GB:

Figure 4.3: Screenshot of text W2C-003: 2, coded as a news report in ICE-GB.

Here is the text itself: Will the trigger pull the finger in the Gulf? Norman F. Dixon analyses the factors, like boredom and cognitive dissonance, that may lead to war—that can engulf mankind By Norman F Dixon WERE it not for the barrage balloons, went the second world war joke, the sheer weight of American forces gathered in Britain would have pushed us below the sea.

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Chapter Four This build-up of allied strength happened quite a long time into the war: it determined the outcome, not the outbreak, of hostilities. But what if a massive build-up of armed strength occurs before a war has started? What are the chances of it being used?

No intro indicating a news story is present in this text; rather, the author seems to be developing a piece of news and to further analyze its development, as is typical of a news feature or of a commentary. Since the number of texts from journalistic writing in ICE-GB is relatively limited, the issue of reliability of the data is particularly cogent, especially because codification mistakes hinder the possibility of comparing this variety with other varieties belonging to the same ICE project. Indeed, the systems of corpus annotation and codification are always double-faced: while simplifying the task of the scholar by identifying specific categories within the corpus, nonetheless they risk being misleading. A wider corpus with a much higher number of data from the Press might limit the ‘damages’ resulting from the wrong codification of some of the data encoded in the corpus. Undoubtedly, there are caveats to this respect as well; although, as Williams points out, “we seem doomed to build larger and larger corpora at the risk of losing the wood for the trees” (Williams 2002: 44) and of getting drowned in the overflow of data, largeness should be proportionate to the actual empirical necessity for the corpus to be sufficiently representative of the linguistic variety that is being studied. Nonetheless, true representativeness itself seems illusory. Let us consider the Reuters Corpus; it covers about 810,000 English language news stories—issued by Reuters from August 1996 to August 1997— which might qualify the database as adequately representative of news stories as a textual variety. All the stories are reproduced in full and most of them do not exceed 6-7 paragraphs. Figure 4.4 testifies to great variability with reference to the number of words covered by each story, despite the high concentration of 800-1,200 word-long texts. This distributional unevenness cannot be overlooked in any analysis of the lexical density of news stories; most of all, the unique source of the stories, Reuters, might hinder the degree of corpus representativeness; stories from other newsagents would certainly reduce the risk of arbitrariness in the choice of words, grammatical and syntactic patterns, and discourse features. Hence, enlarging the corpus with more stories from Reuters, as the publisher itself envisages, would be of little help for the wider representativeness of the genre under scrutiny.

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Figure 4.4: D Distribution of words w per story in the Reuters C Corpus (adapted from http://about.reeuters.com/reseearchandstandarrds/corpus/statiistics/index.asp)).

Slightly more diversified, but still falling into tthe same ‘traap’ as the Reuters corrpus, is Channging Times, published onn CD-ROM by News Multimedia and coveringg about 15,000 0 original articcles selected from The Times and T The Sunday Tiimes from 178 85 (the foundiing of The Tim mes) until 1992. Thesee articles (a) tend to be much m longer thhan Reuters’ texts, (b) focus on a sset of politicaal, social and economic toppics, and (c) cover c not only reportss, but also lettters, commen ntaries, and peersonal remin niscences. Yet, again, tthe data are siingle-sourced, since they ar are selected ex xclusively from The T Times. Indeedd, this is the case for maany of the newspaper corpora currrently availabble, which aree generally sinngle-sourced; thus one must bear inn mind the isssue of idiosy yncrasies of thhe writer(s) an nd of the political andd ideological slant of the masthead, m whhen exploiting g a set of sources for llinguistic studdies that is intended to geneeralize on the language of news repoorting. A final caveat shoulld be pointed d out with rreference to the Time Magazine C Corpusʊmenttioned above in i this sectionnʊwhose datta may be useful to stuudy the develoopment of new wspaper languuage in generaal, but not

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so suitable for the language of news reports in particular, since Time is a news magazine typified largely by news features rather than by news reports. Undoubtedly, what I personally view as a drawback may not be considered such by those scholars whose research aims are perfectly met by the data covered by the above-mentioned corpora; my exemplifications do not necessarily imply that these databases are faulty, but rather I intend to illustrate that no ‘principled’ corpus will ever be principled enough to fit the needs of all researchers. Most importantly, no scholar should ever fall into the trap of considering one’s database a faithful mirror of the variety the corpus has been built to represent, however principled and wide-ranging it may be; indeed, it is always doubtful whether the texts included in corpora (have) been selected in a manner that makes them truly representative of the speech or writing of the general population from whom the texts in the corpus have been selected. (Kretzschmar, Meyer et al. 1997: 168)

It is also true, as Leitner writes, that any corpus would run the risk of over-reporting some words (…) or underreporting others (…). Secondly, it seems inconceivable to ever design a representative corpus if one understands by that a representation of the language at large. How would one weigh objectively the types of data that should go into it? Would it not be better, after all, to tie the notion of representativity to that of the type of language experience of a selected group of speakers and give up the attempt to design a corpus that is representative of an entire language? (Leitner 2000: 175-6)

Perfectly legitimate claims like the one by Leitner had their onset as soon as computerized corpora moved their first steps in the world of linguistics, and are likely to persist if we do not abandon the tenet that a corpus should be principled and representative of one or more varieties of language, including the genre of news reporting, in order to be qualified as a corpus. If this is the case, then, a collection of non-annotated instances of news reports randomly downloaded from the web should be dismissed as a ‘non-corpus’—which is certainly not the case. So, if any instance of language use can be exploited as a corpus, it is the mind of the researchers that should be ‘principled’, in so far as they have a specific research aim in their minds when approaching a corpus. Then, corpora are to be seen as the tools by which the mind of the scholar ploughs up the field of language, but it is the mind that should direct this

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tool and set specific working schedules and research patterns. This attitude to corpora would help undo a few knots concerning the reliability of corpus data since, depending on the scholar’s aims, a strictly balanced distribution of spoken and written texts belonging to any variety might be unnecessary or even discriminatory for the final choice of one corpus rather than of another one. Hence, the reliability of corpora would no longer be judged—as is still done quite frequently—according to how much data they cover; for example, it would be churlish to criticize the lack of balance between the spoken and the written data of the BNC, not only because its 10% spoken section is in fact no less than a highly dignified set of 10 million words, but also and mostly because corpus reliability and representativeness find confirmation or are disclaimed not in principle, but against the diversified test of every single linguistic study that is being carried out; in short, the same corpus may be useful for one purpose and useless for another. This does not mean that the quantitative distribution of data bears no importance; on the contrary, in the vast majority of cases it is from the quantitative data that scholars set off in order to reach reliable qualitative conclusions. Yet the caveat concerning the quantitative balance of data in a corpus would be of value should there be few corpora available on the market, but luckily at present databases, and news-related corpora as well, are so many and so diversified that scholars can easily select, analyze and compare data from different databases for their research purposes.

6. Studying the language of news in the 21st century In this section I will overview two main trends of studies that have emerged over the last fifty years within the framework of corpus-based research of news-related discourse. Specifically, in the first place, scholars have started to challenge the traditional pillars of ‘impartiality’ and ‘objectivity’ widely taken for granted as intrinsic of news reporting, and have moved towards more realistic considerations on ‘perspective’ and ‘subjectivity’, often rooted in the socio-geographical backgrounds against which the news discourse is produced. Secondly, scholars have started to investigate how far technological developments have impinged on ‘the new face’ of news writing; thus, they have abandoned the notion of the news report as the exclusively linguistic output of the news making process, and have grasped the key role played by (a) other semiotic cotextual elements, (b) the different stages featuring the news making practice and, most of all, (c) the ‘online revolution’.

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Far from claiming comprehensiveness, in the following sections I will overview the literature in these two fields, while in Section 6.3 I will illustrate a case study which merges such trends of analysis and thus epitomizes the new attitudes to corpus-based studies of news-related discourse.

6.1 From ‘impartiality’ to ‘perspective’ in news reporting across the globe Since the 1970s scholars have delved more and more into a set of contextualizing variables of news reports, that is, they have focussed largely on the fact that news reporting is not an aseptic genre, on the contrary, it is strongly embedded in the local culture(s) where it is produced and is affected by its non-linguistic ‘constituents’, like writer, intended readership, and textual aim. All these aspects are so entrenched in the news writing process that they largely affect the output also—maybe mostly—with regard to the ‘writing angle’. Hence, key features like (a) the inverted pyramid or top-down structure, (b) impartiality and objectivity in content delivery, and (c) the cross-linguistic homogeneity in structure and style have been increasingly questioned and discussed. Broadly speaking, studies focussing on these issues can now be placed along a continuum line whose two discrete poles are ‘descriptive objectivity’ on the one side and ‘interpretative subjectivity’ on the other; the overwhelming majority of research can be placed in between these two discrete poles. So, while Martin and White remark that news reports are indeed still objectively presented,21 although the reporters have at their disposal a wide range of possibilities to express their views covertly (Martin and White 2005: 164-184), Adriaansen, van Praag et al. claim that “the way the media report the news has shifted from a mostly descriptive manner to an interpretative style. Substantive news has become less prevalent as strategic news becomes more prevalent” (Adriaansen, van Praag et al. 2010: 434). Fowler is more radical, in stating that “news is (…) not a value-free reflection of ‘facts’” (Fowler 1991: 4), which dovetails with Pounds’ (2010) remark that “all journalism is ultimately opinion journalism in that it is always possible to detect signs of authorial

21

Specifically, Martin and White distinguish between “commentator voice”, “correspondent voice” and “reporter voice” and posit that, unlike the previous two, “in reporter voice access to unmediated explicit judgement of all types is curtailed”. (Martin and White 2005: 173)

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stance even in so-called ‘hard-news reporting’ which is clearly marked as such” (Pounds 2010: 107). Whatever the opinion, the stronghold of unquestionable impartiality and objectivity has been shaken to the root; journalistic objectivity is by now “regarded as a myth” (Stenvall 2008: 1569) to the point that one might even claim with Peters (2011) that “the significant change over the past few decades is not that the news has become emotional (indeed, it has always been); rather the diversity of emotional styles, the acceptability of journalistic involvement and attempts to involve the audience have become more explicit” (Peters 2011: 297). Even when reporting emotions, news journalists resort to ‘affect values’ quite frequently, as pointed out by Stenvall (2014) who suggests a taxonomy of reporting affect distinguishing between ‘attributed’ (including ‘experienced’) and nonattributed’, and drawing on examples from Associated Press and Reuters news agency dispatches. Studies on the ‘angle’ and ‘stance’ exploited for news presentation have drawn particular attention to the variable of geographical variation, which has proved to impinge on the shaping of news discourse as much as intra-linguistic factors. With reference to English, this has been researched both in its different geographical varieties and cross-linguistically, by comparing English to other languages. Miciano (2002) has analyzed 15 news stories from three English language Philippine broadsheets focussing on the court decision in a murder case of the year 2000.22 Her study of modality, narrative features and reported speech reveals that, in these Philippine quality papers, some news reports were written like fiction, particularly with reference to the intro; thus not only did they contravene the advocated neutrality of the intro, but they also threatened to unseat the so-called ‘rule of the five Ws’ (and one H). Moreover, Miciano notices some peculiarities that do not respect the inverted pyramid structure, like building up of a climax, starting up with the denouement of a story or presenting the story characters in detail. These changes, mostly in the intro, add a dramatic flavour to something that should only be reportorial and may affect the reaction of the readers to the story and their consequent attitude to the people involved in the reported event. Still focusing on Philippine news discourse, Dayag analyzes the headlines of one news story in five different newspapers.23 All the reports

22

Specifically, the author analyzed the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Manila Bulletin and the Philippine Star. 23 The corpus covers front-page news stories in the following English-language newspapers of national circulation: Philippine Daily Inquirer, Manila Bulletin,

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dealt with a hostage drama in Iraq involving the overseas Philippine truck driver Angelo de la Cruz, his release from his Iraqi captors, and his homecoming and reunion with his family in the Philippines. Dayag studies the strategies enacted by the different papers to foreground and frame such an event, with special attention to a set of patterns for topicalization and thematization. The results show that the reporters clearly provide their ‘angle’ (a) by portraying the worker as a celebrity and (b) by giving maximum foregrounding to the Philippine government as a ‘participant’ to the event, while backgrounding the rest of the actors in the story. Both Miciano and Dayag’s studies highlight that, despite lack of overt subjectivity in the choice of connotative lexicon, still the way of framing a story and of foregrounding/backgrounding its actors subsumes the writer’s or the paper’s perspective to that event. This transpires even more clearly in Hakam’s (2009) analysis of the role played by the Arab cultural background in shaping news discourse. Hakam has compiled a corpus of 422 news texts from English-language Arab newspapers addressing the events and issues known as the ‘Prophet Muhammad cartoons controversy’, which burst in Europe between 2005 and 2006.24 The corpus has been analyzed against the background of (a) Critical Discourse Analysis and (b) Mills’ concept of “signals of affiliation” (Mills 1995: 58), to account for differences in texts of a similar nature written by members of a socially definable group (Hakam 2009: 38). His study of signals of affiliation, but also of modality, naming and description, word collocation, presupposition, and foregrounding in headlines and intros, proves how far ideology shapes news reports in general and in the Arab world in particular. Indeed, both when producing their own texts and when using news copies generated by the major (Euro-centered) international news agencies, Arab writers signal their affiliation to Arab and Muslim ideologies, to the point that “the English-language Arab newspaper may be described as both a product of society and a shaper of its discourse” (Hakam 2009: 34). The shaping of news discourse is undoubtedly affected by other variables, including the type of event and of readership, not to mention discourse community. This is confirmed by Yell (2012), who has analyzed Philippine Star, The Manila Times, and Today. A total of 85 issues were selected from July 9 to July 25, 2004. 24 The controversy was spurred by the publication in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, on 30 September 2005, of 12 editorial cartoons, most of which caricatured the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Hakam’s corpus data cover articles culled from the websites of 19 English-language Arab newspapers from 12 different countries in the Arab world.

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the Australian print media coverage of the 2009 Australian bushfires and the 2010 Haiti earthquake to show how the process of news mediation and representation differs for local and international events. In turn, Shie (2011) has focussed on this in a study of two national editions of the same newspaper—respectively the New York Times (NYT) and the Times Supplement (TS) of the United Daily News, one of the leading Mandarin Chinese newspapers in Taiwan.25 Both NYT and TS are written by the same news-writers from NYT;26 however, NYT is addressed to ordinary educated readers, who are proficient mother-tongue speakers of English, while TS is addressed to speakers of English as a foreign language, who have learnt or are learning English through education in Taiwan. Shie’s textual and stylistic analysis of the variations in the use of non-lexicalized metaphors and metonymies between corresponding NYT and TS news deadlines proves that the writers write different headlines depending on their intended audience. Indeed, up to 86.6% of the headlines differed between the two newspapers; overall, more non-lexicalized metaphors and metonymies occurred in NYT headlines than in the their corresponding TS headlines, whose texts were in turn written in a less sophisticated style to make headlines more accessible to the general TS readers. Hence, the language of both newspapers is “tailored to enhance affinity between the text and the target audience” (Shie 2011: 1329). Metaphors in newspaper language are a frequent topic of analysis also cross-linguistically, to contrast English to other languages. For example, in a study comparing British and French newspaper reports describing the 2008 parliamentary elections of Musharraf in Pakistan and of Obama in the United States, Burnes (2011) highlights the fact that metaphors have been largely used in news reports of both elections, particularly as metaphors of war, but for different purposes. In Pakistan, they were mostly metaphors of war, focussing on ‘physical combat’ and indicating a debacle for Musharraf, who was not actually even running for president. In 25

Shie’s corpus comprises all the TS news articles published by the United Daily News in print form across a period of eight months in 2008 and all the corresponding NYT news articles drawn from the NYT article archive on the website of the NYT. 26 Shie explains the relationship between TS and NYT news pieces as follows: A team of New York Times editors and designers prepare the Times Supplement from recent New York Times news items in consultation with United Daily News editors. (…) The collaboration between the two newspapers results in the weekly Times Supplement in the United Daily News (…). Each TS article corresponds to a NYT article in the sense that the former is edited, almost always very lightly, from the latter, but nothing of substance is changed. (Shie 2011: 1318)

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the US, metaphors also pertained to ‘entertainment’ and ‘dream’ and emphasized the positivity of Obama’s victory. Metaphors, particularly those related to war, acted in a persuasive, subliminal way; as a result, the news reports where they were recorded, while being superficially objective, still projected negative or positive evaluations of the facts. These news reports not only report but also interpret news. Hence, Burnes concludes that “the choice of a metaphorical frame—conflict rather than, say, sport—is a conscious decision on the part of the journalist, reflecting the choice of the effects which can be obtained from the use of that frame” (Burnes 2011: 2162). Still within the cross-linguistic framework of analysis, Murata (2007) compares pro- and anti-whaling news discourse in British English and Japanese reports, paying special attention to lexical choices, grammatical and syntactic structures, rhetorical devices, and discursive patterns.27 This case study testifies to the fact that British and Japanese news writers use seemingly opposing strategies when expressing their anti- and pro-whaling stances, in so far as the former tend to use a more emotive and provocative tone, whereas the latter use a more restrained and factual tone. More specifically, British news reports directly quote anti-whaling campaigners’ voices, which are emotionally charged; moreover, their arguments are not necessarily coherent or supported by evidence. In contrast, Japanese news reporters mainly describe facts, although mostly on the basis of the Japanese government’s press releases, and justify the government’s action largely on the basis of scientific data released from the International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee. Overall, both nations’ reports seem to be prone to provide information favouring the respective nations’ attitude. This could affect the readers’ attitude in their respective nations, since they “may come to have opposing views on the same issue under the influence of cumulative exposure to a one-sided view” (Murata 2007: 756). A final word in this quick overview of case studies proving scholarly awareness that news reports ‘deliver facts in perspective’ and that a host of variables impinge on the writing process, must be dedicated to the background of the news writer, be it from the Anglo-American tradition or from the Western European school, and on its possible impact on the way content and style are shaped. Pounds’ (2010) study may suffice as an example. By means of a cross-linguistic analysis of British and Italian 27

His corpus comprises articles on whaling from the Independent (1988–2001), the Guardian (1997–2001), and the Japanese newspapers Asahi, Yomiuri and Nihon Keizai (1999–2002, but also the years 1982, 1986, 1987, 1992, which mark important international decisions on whaling).

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newspapers, Pounds explores to what extent the “reporter voice” (Martin and White 2005: 165) can be detected and how such voice can be brought back to the author’s formalized education in news reporting. The author has selected a total of 28 news articles dealing with accidents, misfortunes and crimes, 14 from Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica—two of the most established Italian broadsheets—and 14 from The Guardian and The Times—two equivalent English broadsheets; the articles date between 2006 and 2009. Overall the data show that both Italian and English news reports avoid explicit subjective expressions relating to certainty, obligation, denial and speculative cause/effect. Yet the Italian ‘reporter voice’ appears to allow more room for the authorial interpretative presence and ‘personalization’, particularly by means of frequent (a) references to others’ mental states and feelings, (b) intensification, and (c) expression of uncertainty and evidentiality, and in turn by means of the infrequent reliance on attribution to experts. According to Pounds, such differences between the British and the Italian newspapers seem to reflect the difference between the ‘objective’ journalistic styles typical of the AngloAmerican tradition, favouring ‘impartiality’ and ‘fair representation’ and the more ‘interpretative style’ favouring ‘advocacy’, “understood as uncovering bias and promoting a critical stance” (Pounds 2010: 121) typical of the Western European school of journalism. In conclusion, as this brief overview has illustrated, the labels of ‘impartiality’, ‘objectivity’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘factuality’ badly fit the language of news, at least the kind of news reporting produced in the late 20th century and early 21st century. However, the overview also proves that news reports are not as overtly subjective as op-eds; they are still first and foremost fact-based; and their lexicon is still largely denotative. What scholars have started to detect and observe ‘in silhouette’ is the ‘perspective’ that leads the writer’s hand, the ‘slant’ that runs all through a news report, the Weltanschauung that transpires from the text. Hence, now, it is no longer a surprise to read statements like the one by Clark (2010) when opening his paper on evidentiality in the quality press: The news story is popularly considered to be a means of transferring ‘knowledge’ about current situations and events to the reader—knowledge which may be intact, as recounted or witnessed, or may be manipulated by the writer. (Clark 2010: 139)

When ‘manipulation’ or rather—let us exploit a possibly more proper and less biased word— when the author’s ‘perspective’ is coupled, as necessarily is the case, by the readers’ ‘perspective’, the information delivered in the news piece must be as complete and exhaustive as

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possible, in order to safeguard fact. Diversified sources, figures, numbers and background information may thus be of key value in producing the news piece, or rather, as will be seen in section 6.2, the ‘news package’.28

6.2 From ‘news pieces’ to ‘news packages’ In the era of the Internet and of multimodality, the very notions of text and discourse need to be re-shaped; by now texts, as remarked by Jucker (2005), “are no longer well-defined entities with clear beginnings and ends, but they have become conglomerates of interlinked text modules” (Jucker 2005: 293). Bearing this in mind, to study online news, scholars need to be also aware of the general characteristics of online news discourse. A case in point is the Twitter community, which exploits a set of typographic conventions marking specific moves within the community, the most common being ‘@’, ‘RT’ and ‘#’. The @ character is used as a deictic marker indicating that the username which follows is addressed in the tweet; in turn, the character combination RT is exploited to ‘retweet’, i.e. republish, part or all of a tweet, intact or modified. Finally, # marks the topic of a tweet. These typographic hashtags are “a novel and emergent form of punctuation usage” (Zappavigna 2011: 789) functioning as intratextual linguistic markers, inline metadata, whose main aim is to call other twitters to participate, to create a community of values, a “hive mind”, in Zappavigna’s (2011: 789) terms.29 Unlike general markup—which is hidden by browsers and other display services—hashtags are purposefully shown. Being aggregatable and searchable, they cannot be overlooked when compiling a corpus, particularly when defining its classificatory system. Indeed, when retrieving tweets, both values/comments and facts are inserted, as shown in Figure 4.4 above and as testified to by Zappavigna (2011). He has compiled a corpus collecting all the tweets with the keyword string ‘Obama’ in the 24 hours after the announcement 28

Early traces of news stories turning into packages have been mentioned in Chapter 3, Section 2.2. 29 In an overview of the typography of online and offline texts in a multimodal, semiotic perspective, Van Leeuwen even posits that we are now witnessing a new form of writing, a new typography, able to realize not only textual, but also ideational and interpersonal meanings: “A new typography has emerged which no longer sees itself as a humble craft in the service of the written word, but as a spearheading innovation in graphic design, and which no longer sees typography as an ‘abstract art’, but as a means of communication in its own right” (Van Leeuwen 2006: 144)

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that Barak Obama had won the 2008 US presidential election. The corpus comprises 45,290 tweets for a total of 813,310 words and has been analyzed within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics to highlight ideational (content) and interpersonal (evaluative) meanings. The data show that the tweets seem “to be performing a function beyond informing other ‘twits’ of the new” (Zappavigna 2011: 798). The corpus is rich in evaluative language, which seems to be a key feature of tweets in general and “suggests that the tweets may be forming a more interpersonal social function in which users are affiliating around values relating to the election result” (Zappavigna 2011: 798). This peculiarity makes Twitter “an interpersonal search engine” (Zappavigna 2011: 804) and obliges compilers to discriminate, when selecting twits, between the pure messages and the interpersonally charged ones. Beside graphic elements, over the last ten years a broad swathe of scholarly studies has also focused on other intra-linguistic co-textual aspects, particularly the interrelations between image and verbiage in both print and online newspapers. So, for example, Wells (2007) delves into the rhetoric of images, which contributes to shaping the narrative about the cause and consequences of events. His case study of the display of Iraqi children by the British press during the UK/US invasion of Iraq leads him to argue that such use of images serves two opposing aims: fostering skepticism for war on the one hand and justifying war on the other. In turn, Perlmutter and Smith Dahmen (2008) link up images to their verbal captions by examining the websites, books and videos dedicated to exploring the ‘moon-hoax’ phenomenon, that is, the claim that the photos of 1969 Apollo moon landing were in reality a hoax. Their analysis of the captions of Apollo lunar landing photographs points to the fact that indeed “seeing is believing” (Perlmutter and Smith Dahmen 2008: 246), since visual details have been used by advocates of this theory as evidence that the mainstream interpretation is ‘visibly’ wrong. Finally, Caple and Bednarek (2010) analyze Image Nuclear News Stories (INNS), as anticipated in Section 4; this recently emerged genre is currently exploited more and more both by online and by offline newspapers, possibly because on the one hand the lack of extended verbal text saves room on the page, while on the other hand the interplay between headline, image and caption catalyzes the reader’s attention more quickly than the traditional columns of a news story. By studying the corpus of INNSC they have compiled, Caple and Bednark notice that headline, caption and image interplay with each other by triggering humor and cultural allusions that only a reader willing to participate in the humorous activity can unlock. The interplay asks for the participation of the reader,

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who becomes actively involved in the construction of both ideational and interpersonal meaning. All this has the effect of creating a bond with the readers and, possibly, of strengthening their affiliation to the newspaper. The prominent role given to the interrelationship between image and verbiage particularly in journalistic writing leads to a re-think of corpuslinguistic studies and analytical methodologies in this field, since it increasingly calls into question the co-text for the proper understanding of the overall semantic and pragmatic meaning of a news story as it is presented. By now, newspaper discourse cannot be viewed and studied exclusively or mostly as a monolithic verbal text; on the contrary, it is the multi-faceted polyhedron whereby image, image-caption, headline, column, lay-out, and positioning in the (web-)page simultaneously contribute to the meaning-making process of the piece in a compositional way. Thus, the ‘news piece’ has turned into a ‘news package’ that calls for a holistic interpretation in order to be fully grasped. This is even more so if we consider that recently a new form of report has emerged, strongly linked to photojournalism: the audio slideshow/soundslide report on online news sites; this is a digital format featuring a series of images coupled with soundtrack. Engebretsen (Engebretsen 2014) remarks that, though still not very much in use, slideshow reports could contribute to the ecology of journalistic genres, since they possess discursive and aesthetic potentials that intersect journalism and art. On a web page the bond between the different facets of the ‘news package’ has to come to terms with the peculiarity of online newspaper webpages, that is—due to its “instantly impermanent” nature (Perlmutter 2003: 5)—with the need to cram into the webpage as many ‘news packages’ as possible. This is why researchers of the language of online journalism have also become interested in ‘thumbnails’, that are reducedsize version of images very frequent on webpages. Knox (2009) investigates their use in a corpus of home pages of the Sydney Morning Herald online, collected on a five-day week over three separate periods (February–April 2002, September–November 2005, and January–April 2006), for a total of 15 home pages and 250 images. His data lead him to conclude that thumbnails serve a set of purposes, among which they point at the ‘who’ of the story, much more than at the ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘where’, ‘when’ or ‘why’; moreover, the overriding frequency of close-up shots adds to the construction of interpersonal meaning leading to closer intimacy between viewer and the object of the image. Finally, and most importantly, they function as a kind of “expanded graphology, extending the potential of language” (Knox 2009: 149), since in every single

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thumbnail image studied by Knox the three semiotic trajectories typified by (a) news images, (b) typography and (c) punctuation converge to produce a composite semiotic environment where the traditional division between image and verbiage is increasingly challenged. Be they thumbnails or digital photos or again videos produced online, visual data have become a major part of news photographers’ work and of journalism in general; consequently, their relationship with the running verbal text needs to be approached in a thorough, in-depth way, without overlooking digital photo editing, video production and user-generated images in online and print newspapers, as illustrated by Mäenpää (2014). Dealing with this new generation of news-packages calls into question the news making process as a whole as well. Indeed, a very recent trend of analysis that has been gaining ground particularly in the first decade of the 21st century focuses on the process of news production rather than on the pure textual output. This trend of research started up in the 1970s within the tradition of media studies and was first pursued mostly by sociologists and ethnographers, who focussed on how news is actually made starting from the newsroom. The field has broadened up to encompass discourserelated disciplines as well. Interesting studies in this field have been carried out by the NewsTalk&Text Research Group (http://www.ntt.ugent.be/), who point to a holistic account of news, starting from the analysis of sources and ending up with the interplay of language use and journalism, media and society. Such studies focus on news discourse as ‘text-in-co(n)text’, viewing it as a process, or a series of processes of entextualization and contextualization. In such a framework, press agencies, journalists, freelance journalists (‘stringers’), sub-editors, editors and readers are part of the same chain and active, dynamic participants in the process of news entextualization.30 Within these studies, with reference to news sources, scholars have started to study not only why texts stemming from the same news sources turn out to be different, as illustrated in Section 6.1, but also how they end up being diversified, how language is reshaped during the writing and editorial process, how input stories are selected and adapted to map changes between final newspaper output and original input source supplied by news agencies. So, Lams (2011) has studied news accounts of the Hong Kong transfer of sovereignty from the British Crown to China in 1997. Since the process has been followed extensively in Taiwan as well, 30

All this gets even more complex if we consider the processes of translation and linguistic adaptation of some worldwide news broadcasters; the BBC for example, broadcasts in a total of 32 different languages around the world; hence aspects of localization come into place as well.

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Lams has analyzed a set of foreign news agencies’ articles adopted by China Post and China News, two Taiwanese English-language newspapers, which draw on the same news stories and sources. His study provides ample evidence of editorial policy in the two newspapers leading to a “domestication process” of the sources, in the sense that “transformations encode the cultural values of each newspaper and its intended readership” (Lams 2011: 1862). Other studies on the news making process focus on press releases and on the social and textual practices that surround their transformation into news reports. Their research follows the news story from the source to the output, starting from how a reporter discovers a story, introduces it into the newsroom, writes and reflects on it. Van Hout and Jacobs (2010) provide an overview and a background of these theoretical efforts, which they term the “ethnography of news production”, and distinguish between ‘the first wave’ of early studies in this field and ‘the second wave’, where technological, economic, regulatory and cultural changes have been taken into account as well. News production is strongly intertwined with news translation, as is well illustrated by Valdeón (2012), who provides an overview of the role translation has played in news transmission since the birth of journalism until the 21st century and posits that “the advent and spread of the Internet has made the role of translation more apparent, even if it remains an invisible second-rate activity within the news production process” (2012: 850). In turn, Van Doorslaer (2012), developing on the shift from ‘translation’ to ‘transediting’, introduces the terms ‘journalator’, a newsroom worker who makes aboundant use of translation when transferring and reformulating news texts; Van Doorslaer posits that the borderlines between translation, localization and rewriting have by now become very blurred in the contexct of news production. In this field, corpus-based research is still in its pioneering phase. In contrast, a number of corpus-based studies can already be developed to analyze news-related discourse by merging the structural novelties of the news package on the one hand and the increasing awareness of the centrality of perspective on the other, as will be illustrated in Section 6.3.

6.3 Merging the novelties: A case study As mentioned above, social media have contributed to blurring the difference between mainstream and citizen journalism; news-related blogs, for instance, may be run by mainstream newspapers and institutions, or by independent professional journalists or, again, by ordinary citizens.

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Moreover, within one single blog, news and news commentaries may coexist and be posted by more than one author. This certainly impinges on (a) the data to be selected for analysis and, consequently, on (b) the language to be studied. As a case study exemplifying what has been discussed particularly in Sections 6.1 and 6.2, I will present the analysis of a corpus of blog posts related to the news of the Russo-Georgian war that burst out in the Caucasus in August 2008.31 The search focussed on August 2008, the month when the conflict developed and hit the headlines, and the corpus data were retrieved through a keyword search on the main countries directly involved in the conflict: ‘Abkhazia’, ‘Georgia’, ‘Russia’, and ‘South Ossetia’. The keywords were searched (a) on specialized search engines for blogs, like Google Blogs, Technorati Blogs Directory and Yahoo! Search Blog, (b) on blog portals/providers such as WordPress and Metafilter, (c) on English language newspaper websites (identified through the LexisNexis newspaper database), and finally (d) by following the links to other blogs on any retrieved blog. A total of 705 posts were collected, published in 65 different blogs for 424,129 running words. The first stumbling block of the study was the actual classification and categorization of these data. Indeed, by relying on the description provided in the profile sections of the blogs retrieved, a preliminary distinction was made between (1) Mainstream media j-blogs, published on the websites of news media organizations, (2) Freelance j-blogs, authored by freelance journalists, independently of any news media organization, and (3) Citizen blogs, authored by bloggers who are not professional journalists. However, the categorization had to be reviewed when a number of blogs were found not to fit such taxonomy fully, since they gather multiple authors, both journalists and non-journalists, who present themselves as an organized entity, mostly an online news outlet, with a detailed board of editors, a mission, and given roles for each contributor. Since these blogs place themselves somewhere in between Mainstream media j-blogs and Citizen blogs, these cases were subsumed under the category ‘Independent j-blogs’, while ‘Freelance j-blogs’ was dropped as a term. Hence the data were categorized as follows:

31 South Ossetia and Abkhazia declared their independence from Georgia, which resulted in Georgia attacking the two separatist regions; in retaliation and support to South Ossetia and Abkhatia, Russia invaded Georgia. Also thanks to international diplomatic intervention, within a month the two parties declared a cease-fire.

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-

-

-

Mainstream media j-blogs (MB), published on the websites of news media organizations operating also offline, such as printed newspaper companies and TV or radio news broadcasters; Independent j-blogs (IB), portraying themselves as a form of independent journalism, being authored either by freelance professional journalists or by bloggers organized as an online independent media outlet; Citizen blogs (CB), published by bloggers who are not professional journalists.

Although this categorization mirrors the corpus contents to a large extent, nevertheless, whenever selecting data from the web for (linguistic) analysis, one should keep in mind that it is not always possible to verify the trustworthiness of what is found on screen and to ensure a bi-univocal relationship between what is claimed and the actual nature of what is retrieved. To this respect, Internet data in general—and blogs in this case—do not qualify as a reliable source with reference to data authorship. The authorship knot gets even more tight if we consider that each blog frequently hosts posts from more than one author; so, in order to analyze reliable data, the optimum would be to codify every single post with reference to its authorship as well. Indeed, the language of an ordinary citizen with no acquaintanceship with formal news writing conventions is quite possibly different from that of a professional. Moreover, a number of data published on the net in these blogs, although related to a specific set of news stories, may still not be news reports in the actual sense of the word, since their content and structure may rather be closer to commentaries or even features. This is why, when studying the language of news, I favour the term ‘news-related blog/post’ to the more simple ‘news blog/post’; as previously remarked, a wrong categorization may be misleading for linguistic analysis. Since the main focus on this preliminary case study was on the language of news-related blogs, no further distinction was made in the linguistic analysis with reference to authorship, although the 65 blogs were quantitatively subdivided to highlight the number of posts screened in each of the three subcategories. Table 4.9 summarizes such data:

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Blogs

Posts

Tokens

MB

26

104

63,620

IB

21

343

250,548

CB

18

258

109,961

Total

65

705

424,129

Table 4.9: No. of blogs, posts and tokens retrieved. The linguistic analysis carried out on the corpus has focussed on the following aspects: - frequency, distribution and typology of time adverbials, in order to study the degree of timeliness of such blog posts in hitting the headlines; - frequency and distribution of first and second-person pronouns, and their related verbal predicates, in order to highlight the degree of interactivity. 6.3.1 Time adverbials The data show that MBloggers write their texts with regular attention to the precision of time that is typical of professional journalism, while such precision is less evident in the other types of blogs. Table 4.9 shows the distribution and frequency of time adverbials today, tomorrow, tonight / this evening, yesterday, time reference + ago (ex: two years ago, a day ago), and finally this + time reference (ex: this morning/afternoon/week). Overall, the three types of weblogs make use of today more than all the other adverbials (8.7 per 10,000 words), mostly with past time reference, though future time reference is also present. Today is followed in frequency by “time + ago” (5.0), while tonight (mostly with future time reference) and tomorrow are used the least (0.6 and 1.1 respectively). This suggests that the posts focus on past or concomitant events more than on future ones, that is to say, understandably, they tend to focus more on the report and analysis of what has happened rather than on speculations on the future.

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MB

IB

CB

14.8

7.3

7.6

Tomorrow

2.8

0.8

0.7

Tonight / This evening

2.0

0.3

0.5

Yesterday

4.2

2.9

3.0

Time + ago

10.1

4.8

2.6

This + Time

6.0

1.5

2.7

39.9

17.6

17.1

Today

TOTAL

Table 4.10: Time adverbials (normalized data per 10,000 words). Despite such overall similarity, the figures also show a clear difference in results between MB on the one hand and IB and CB on the other, with MB exploiting time adverbials much more than the other two categories, particularly CB. When viewing the findings in detail, MB exhibit an overwhelming majority of occurrences with specific time reference, particularly with today and in collocation with ago, while indefinite time references like “some time ago”, “a short while ago”, “a few moments ago” occur to a very limited extent. Indeed, almost the totality of the collocations “number + minute(s) / moment(s) / hour(s) ago” of the whole corpus (23 out of 25) occur in MB:32 1) Some 15-20 minutes ago, a lot of armed people wearing masks entered Gori. (MB-RFE-22)

In contrast, IB and CB exploit less precise temporal patterns and make a more limited use of numbers: 2) Seems that Georgia cut the water supply over a month ago… (CBWtR-11)

32

In all the examples, bold characters are mine.

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3) If you want some solid background reading about the hell that broke loose in Georgia a few days ago, take a look at this dispatch by Joshua Kucera from South Ossetia that Slate published a few months ago. (IB-MJT-9)

Hence, MB seem more keen to convey the timeliness and recency of the news piece than CB and IB. Indeed, background reference to a past moment in time more remote than minutes or days (such as “forty years ago”, “twenty months ago”) before the event can be found only in IB and particularly in CB: 4) For people who live far from the Caucasus, it may be easy to forget, though perhaps some may still remember the siege of a school in North Ossetia by armed terrorists a few years ago. (CB-Khanya-15)

Such data are further confirmed by MB’s wider use of today (15.2), both with past and with present-time reference, as opposed to IB and CB, which notably employ all the time adverbials under scrutiny at least half as much as MB. 6.3.2 Personal pronouns All three types of blogs use the first-person singular pronoun reference more frequently than the other forms, which is indeed indicative of the personal style of the blog as a genre and which might also suggest a move of professional journalists towards a more personalized register when they blog. However, overall, Table 4.11 shows that CB and IB behave differently from MB, exhibiting a lower frequency of first-person singular pronouns I (40.2 and 40.6 respectively, compared to 45.9 of MB) and me (4.7 and 7.8) and, in turn, a higher frequency of second-person you (17.7 and 15.7) and first-person plural us (27.8 and 18.1). This would indicate that CB and IB are less self-referential and more participative/interactive than MB.

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MB

IB

CB

TOTAL

45.9

40.6

40.2

126.7

Me

8.6

7.8

4.7

21.1

We

42.8

28.5

29.3

100.6

Us

12.9

18.1

27.8

58.8

You

12.6

15.7

17.7

46.0

122.8

110.7

119.7

353.2

I

TOTAL

Table 4.11: Frequency of 1st and 2nd personal pronouns/10,000 words. Specifically, in CB I and me are almost exclusively used to express the blogger’s personal opinion, in collocation with present tense verbs (ex. 5) or in such phrases as “it seems to me”, “for me”, or “I (do) believe / think / bet / can say / (do) wonder / (don’t) know” and again “I am” followed by opinion adjectives, like sure, alarmed, glad (ex. 6): 5) Of course what REALLY concerns me is that the curious lack of street demos from the “anti-war peace activists” who infested our streets when we toppled the butcher of Baghdad. But now Putin is using power to bully and crush..ssssshhhh, say nothing and the BBC will ask no tricky questions. (CB-Bbbc-11) 6) First and foremost, you can call me an unreformed pacifist, but I fail to see how this war is benefiting any party (apart from perhaps China, which may send Putin a thank you card for his generous provision of a distraction from Tibet/human rights etc. during the Olympics). As a longtime observer of these complicated and vastly misunderstood “frozen conflicts”, I am quite alarmed by how quickly this situation destabilized, and how willing Moscow has been to sacrifice its international credibility over these separatist regions. (CB-RARA-11)

In turn, both we and us often instantiate ‘inclusive we/us, generally referring to writer and reader together, as in “we toppled” (ex. 5) above. Moreover, CBloggers use us partly in quotations, to report excerpts from interviews of political leaders or ordinary people from the involved regions (7), but mostly to show the bloggers’ emotionally sharing of the civilians’ plight and their calling for universal values, as in (8) and (9):

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7) “I don’t know how they are going to isolate us,” commented Sergei Lavrov last week. (CB-RA-18) 8) We are dressed in what the raid caught us in—slippers, bathrobes and shorts. (CB-WtR-13) 9) (... ) for every one of us is entitled to defending (sic) their own country and leadership (CB-TC-22)

More significantly, you is used extensively by CBloggers (17.7 as opposed to 12.6 of MB) and almost exclusively when addressing readers, as in (10) and (11), and in answering posters, as in (12): 10) You have to wonder how far the US is prepared to take this—they aren’t going to commit troops and, no matter how much Saakashvili may wish it, NATO is not going to overstretch itself even further. (CBLT-10) 11) Rarely have I saw (sic) such blatant pro-Russia propaganda, gleefully broadcast by the BBC. Did you see it? The BBC exhibits a pride in Russian military prowess that it never could in our British forces. (CBBbbc-12) 12) I have read every single message and comment from you and am so touched by your words. (CB-TC-11)

In contrast, MB exhibit a high degree of self-referentiality, in so far as the authors refer more to themselves and less to their interlocutors. The bloggers here act often as travel feature writers, and particularly in MB we witness a high frequency of verbs referring to past situations or past actions carried out by the bloggers, who, as is typical of travel features in mainstream journalism, report their personal experiences once back from the conflict zones: 13) Two years ago, I traveled to South Ossetia. As soon as we arrived at its self-proclaimed capital—now occupied by Russian troops—I saw an enormous billboard that read, “Vladimir Putin, Our President.” This was on sovereign Georgian territory. (MB-wMS-14) 14) As I said last night, you could also hear quite a few explosions. (MBRFE-22)

Differently from CB, here the use of you hardly shows any indication of interactivity, but is rather a different way of expressing the writer’s experience, as in (14), where this pronoun is used impersonally. As for we, in MB it is often found in quotations from political leaders or military officials, and also, interestingly, as an ‘inclusive we’ referring not so much to the bloggers and readers, but rather to the bloggers as embodying the voice of their mastheads:

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15) As we speak, the USS Kearsarge assault ship is sailing alone in Latin America, totally unescorted, on its own humanitarian mission. (MBWiDA-21)

Both quantitatively and qualitatively, IB confirm their hybrid status, by placing themselves somehow in between the two extremes, as can easily be seen in Table 4.10, since this type of blog shares features both with CB and with MB. Indeed, on the one hand, “if you want” and “do you think”—exhibiting direct interaction between blogger and reader—are the most recurrent clusters with first and second-person pronouns in both IB and CB; on the other hand, IB also exhibit a high use of I/me where the blogger mostly refers to him/herself as reporting his/her experience in the region of the conflict, just as in MB. Echoing Kenix, according to whom “all blogs are not made equal” (2009: 815), these results indicate that news-related blogs are diversified not only according to the subject matter, but also to the writer and the ‘channel’ through which the blogger writes, be it mainstream, independent, or—so to say—‘personal’. Specifically, the study of the linguistic features allows for the following conclusions: 1. -

Mainstream media j-bloggers show preference for: high degree of self-referentiality, specific past time reference when reporting, travel feature linguistic structures, such as the bloggers reporting their past experiences in the conflict areas;

2. Citizen blogs show preference for: - low degree of self-referentiality, - less precise time reference than MB when reporting, 3. Independent j-bloggers share features of both previous categories, thus lying somewhere in between the two, as a hybrid category. All three types of blogs are open access on the web, hence they all share the same potential audience, but diversify with reference to the channel from which they write, be it institutional or not. This may largely account for the linguistic choices of each one of the three. This also leads me to conclude that news-related blogs are a diversified, flexible and adapting category, where well-defined structures give way to free practice and rigid rules of genre give way to the fluidity of language use, depending on the ‘writing platform’.

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7. Conclusion In their special report on the news industry published on July 9, 2011, the Economist makes a number of assertions, among which the following: a. The biggest shift is that journalism is no longer the exclusive preserve of journalists. Ordinary people are playing a more active role in the news system, along with a host of technology firms, news start-ups and not-for-profit groups. b. The news industry is being reshaped by technology—but by undermining the mass media’s business models, that technology is in many ways returning the industry to the more vibrant, freewheeling and discursive ways of the pre-industrial era. (…) The internet is taking the news industry back to the conversational culture of the era before mass media. c. At the same time news is becoming more opinionated, polarised and partisan, as it used to be in the knockabout days of pamphleteering.

Of the three claims made by the Economist, the first one can easily be shared; indeed, as this chapter has extensively illustrated, journalism is now no longer exclusively in the hands of news professionals, since now each one of us can deliver and share news at any moment throughout the world. Tenet (b) can also be shared, since omnivorous Internet eats up and regurgitates onto a screen whatever lands into its net. In such a framework, the rules of power (and the power of rules) crack under the pressure of social networks, of independent newsmakers and of the general community. So, the news enterprise does seem, as pointed out by the Economist, to be turning back to its vibrant early times, particularly its very first decades (cf. Brownlees, Chapter 1), when writers were their own editors and the all-embracing need to find a large readership had not yet infected this novel world. In contrast, tenet (c) is harder to share. Linguistic analyses in particular prove that news reports have not necessarily turned more opinionated. Writers have always had in their power a host of linguistic and textual strategies to ‘position the reader’ vis-à-vis the information in the text, including transitivity, passivization, nominalization, namings and descriptions, foregrounding and backgrounding of ideas/themes, strategies of reporting speech, and modality, among others. All this can easily be encoded in a one deck-long headline, in the intro of the news report, or interspersed within the lines throughout the whole text. Rather, as this chapter has illustrated, what has changed, particularly over the last sixty years of research studies, is the analytical attitude of the researchers, who

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have started to examine these texts with different eyes; they have developed new corpora and applied new research methodologies, largely integrating semiotics to semantics, syntax and pragmatics; hence they can now detect ‘perspective’ in news stories—or I should rather say in ‘news packages’—more at length and more in depth than before. At present news-in-perspective runs largely through wires and cables rather than via ink and on paper. Yet in this chapter we have also seen that newspapers are still largely in use and widely studied. In a conversation with Dennis Griffiths (quoted in Griffiths 2006: 406) in the eighties, Donald Trelford, at the time editor of The Observer, remarked: “Print has survived more than 20 years of TV. It will survive any kind of gadgetry. It will survive space invaders and news on Rubick Cubes.” Thirty years later, the discussion between those who claim the demise of newspapers and others who think that newspapers will never die is still ongoing; meanwhile, a new type of print newspaper has even emerged as front runner: free dailies. They have proliferated and invaded train stations and street corners particularly over the last ten years with surging profits. Will their easy-to-go and easy-to-read texts affect journalism? Like blog posts, tweets and YouTube video-clips, their texts are written by anybody willing to write, not necessarily journalists. Will these new reporters and their language impact journalism in the long run? At the time of writing this chapter, no corpus-based study has been developed on such a topic, but it might be worth delving into this as well. Whatever the author or the (intended) readership, be the news story in print or online, be it objective or in perspective, Rudyard Kipling’s invitation to the reader as published in the poem The Press a century ago should be still endorsed and widely echoed: Sit down at the heart of men and things Companion of the Press! The Pope may launch his Interdict, The Union its decree, But the bubble is blown and the bubble is pricked By Us and such as We. Remember the battle and stand aside While Thrones and Powers confess That King over all the children of pride Is the Press—the Press—the Press!

Now the Press is equally in the hands of the people and in those of professionals, now everybody can “sit down at the heart of men and

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things” and scholars may even have a privileged position when they dive into the language and fish with different nets in the ocean of the Press. We do not know how far the technological developments will take us in the next few decades, nor can we anticipate the possible achievements of this new world of the Press; but whatever the case, I am confident the thirst for news will never be quenched.

CONCLUSION NICHOLAS BROWNLEES

I would like to begin this Conclusion by returning to what Roberta Facchinetti said in the last paragraph of the preceding chapter. In those concluding lines the author affirms that in the future world of news communication there will no doubt be both a fixed and variable component. What will remain stable is our human desire to find out what is happening around us, what will change are the technological means adopted to satisfy such an interest. This understanding of the role and communicative nature of news provides us with an excellent starting point for some concluding remarks on the history of news print as outlined in the present volume. If we look back at the first four centuries of periodical print news, that is, from its origins in the early seventeenth century up until the present day, we see that the existent technological possibilities relating to both the transmission and production of news of any one era unquestionably conditioned the news text itself. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries news travelled slowly in Britain and Europe. As a result, the various weekly, bi-weekly and daily publications during this period contained domestic and foreign news reports with datelines frequently stretching back more than one or two weeks in time. For example, we saw that one of the first corantos contained thirteen separate dispatches with datelines spanning an entire month.1 However, print news was not only much less recent than the news constantly flowing around the globe nowadays but much less textually ordered. News dispatches would usually be placed one after another on the page with little or no editorial attempt to collate and interpret the variegated and sometimes conflicting information arriving from different places and correspondents. Although there are important periods of overt editorial intervention and ideological manipulation (such as the English Civil War Years), very often the onus was on the reader to make sense of 1 See Chapter 1.4.1. for a description of Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germanie, Hungarie, Spaine and France. 1621 (9 July 1621).

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the temporal and topic crisscrossing of early English news pamphlets and newspapers. This general manner of recounting the news changed in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it is probably no coincidence that this change occurred at the same time that the telegraph was being adopted in the communication of news. The chronological recount of news, whereby events are narrated according to their occurrence in time, was increasingly replaced by what came to be known as the inverted pyramid structure. This represented a fundamental difference in news reporting since whereas before the most distant events would usually be reported first and those most recent last, in line with their chronological order, in the inverted pyramid structure it is the most important recent item of news that usually introduces the news report in the form of an Intro that summarizes the main brunt of the report. The telegraph had not only revolutionized the speed of communication, but with it had contributed to a change in the way newspaper reports were written. The present volume’s attention to the ways in which news texts changed over time also prompted reflection on the advent and effect on news discourse of late nineteenth-century mass circulation newspapers, photo journalism and tabloidization in the first half of the early twentieth century, changing modes of news reporting in the latter twentieth century, and most recently the seemingly, ever expanding electronic possibilities for the communication of news. With the latter we moved our focus away from the periodical press to consider new forms and languages of news texts written no longer just by professional journalists but by any individual interested in supplying his or her personal take on any particular issue of the day through the various blogs, tweets and other sundry portals at anyone’s disposal on the internet. At this point we moved away from the study of the British periodical press to consideration of news transmission and discourse in the limitless expanse of ether communication and social media. The present volume’s diachronic approach to news texts is not just reflected in the historical survey but also in the review of the existent machine-readable news corpora. The authors have attempted to present a state-of-the-art account of the research corpora available both in the field of British, and more recently American, periodical news and in the new domains of blogs and tweets. From this description we see that there are many fewer corpora of early print news publications than there are of modern-day news texts. This disparity in research focus does not correspond to an ever growing role of news in our society, since print news in early modern and late modern Britain undoubtedly had a very

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important role in the country’s political and social fabric, but rather to the more prosaic issues of corpus compilation. These early news texts need to be keyed in manually since electronic scanning of the original text does not provide a sufficiently accurate reproduction. Such manual digitization is extremely labour-intensive, as indeed is a substantial mark up in the electronic corpora of formatting and linguistic features, and therefore both aspects need to be taken into consideration by compilers before setting about the compilation of historical news corpora. These are practical questions but as argued in the volume they also have methodological repercussions too. They regard two highly problematic issues of historical news corpora: corpus representativity and quantitative research reliability. What emerges from our volume is the multiplicity of responses to such research questions. The contributors to the present volume know from first-hand experience that a diachronically-structured corpus can never be completely representative but likewise they are also aware that guidelines and compilation principles can be established to ensure that such corpora can be as representative as possible given the objectives and foci of their research. These guidelines and criteria are discussed at length by the authors not only in relation to their own corpora but also as regards other news corpora that are examined. The methodological question of quantitative and qualitative research reliability is likewise examined in relation to various news corpora. One of the key conclusions to emerge from this study is the need for all historical news analysts to be well acquainted with the texts with which they are working. However developed the linguistic and formatting mark up features, such additional characteristics to the raw news texts can only be fully understood and correctly analyzed if the researcher has a sufficiently developed understanding of the texts themselves to contextualize whatever news feature is being analyzed. In this respect we adhere to the broad methodological principles of what is often referred to as corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). This methodological framework has informed the case studies that have been carried out on the corpora that have been examined. We have intentionally presented a range of analyses so as to exemplify not only what can be assuredly identified and assessed within a news corpus but also other discourse features which present a more problematic application of an electronic corpus of news texts. A linguistic feature which has received our particular attention regards the use of personal pronouns, and especially the use of first and second person pronominal forms. The firstperson pronoun is a clear indication of authorial voice—the reporter’s or editor’s commitment to the proposition—whilst the use of the second

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Conclusion

person pronoun exemplifies the news writer’s desire to engage with the reader. The relative presence or absence of such pronominal forms provides the news analyst with important information as to what kind of news text is being written at that specific historical period. However, apart from research questions based around single-word identification and analysis, we have also examined multi-word forms in a variety of contexts. Thus, we have explored the potential of machine-readable news texts to help us analyze important paratextual features such as headlines, datelines or placelines. Further objects of our analysis have involved the identification of linguistic features in different eighteenth-century text classes such as announcements and legal notices on the one hand and advertisements on the other. Even more holistically, we have looked into the possibility of using corpora to distinguish historical newspapers into two broad categories: ‘popular’ and ‘quality’ press. In this respect there is a case study on identifying popularization or ‘conversationalization’ in the press. Of course, whilst we have attempted to answer some of the questions relating to the compilation and use of news corpora—both historical and contemporary—we recognize that there are many, many more aspects that require further examination and study. Regarding this we trust that future researchers will find their own studies as stimulating and rewarding as we have found ours.

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APPENDIX FLORENCE EARLY ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS (FEEN) CORPUS

Florence Early English Newspapers (FEEN) corpus 1. 1620-1621 The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com (2 December 1620). Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germanie, Hungarie, Spaine and France. 1621 (9 July 1621). Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germany, Hungaria, Bohemia, Spaine and Dutchland. 1621 (2 August 1621). Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, Spaine and France. 1621 (24 September 1621). 2. 1622-1624 A continuation of more newes from the Palatinate (13 June 1622). A relation of the weekely occurrences (22 October 1622). A coranto. Relating divers particulars concerning the newes out of Italy, Spaine, Turkey, Persia (7 November 1622). A continuation of the newes of this present weeke (16 November 1622). Newes of Europe (12 March 1624). 3. 1625-1641 A true report of all the speciall passages of note lately happened in the Ile of Ree (1 November 1627). The continuation of our weekely intelligence (29 November 1631). The continuation of our weekely newes (17 December 1631). The continuation of our weekely avisoes (6 July 1632). The curranto for this weeke, from Holland (25 March 1640). The curranto for this weeke, from Norimberg (31 March 1640). The curranto for this weeke, from Franckford (31 March 1640). From Rome. From Hamborough. (21 May 1641). The Imperialists have victualled Wolffenbuttle (4 September 1641).

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Appendix

4. 1642-1649 The Passages in Parliament (3-10 January 1642). A Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages (10-17 July 1644). The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (9-16, 16-23 July 1644). Mercurius Civicus (31 July-7 August, 23-30 October 1645; 8-15 January 1646). The Moderate Intelligencer (19-26 February 1646). Mercurius Pragmaticus (19-26 September, 21-28 November 1648). The Moderate (14-21 November 1648, 13-20 March 1649). 5. 1643-1644 Mercurius Aulicus (1-7 January, 15-21 January, 22-28 January, 29 January-4 February, 5-11 February, 12-18 February, 27August-2 September 1643; 31 March-6 April, 7-13 April, 14-20 April, 21-27 April, 28 April-4 May, 9-15 June, 16-22 June, 23-29 June, 30 June-6 July, 7-13 July, 14-20 July, 28 July-3 August, 4-10 August, 11-17 August, 18-24 August 1644). Mercurius Britanicus (5-12 September, 12-19 September 1643; 10-17 June, 17-24 June, 24-31 (sic) June, 1-8 July, 8-15 July, 15-22 July, 2229 July, 29 July-5August, 12-19 August, 19-26 August, 26 August-2 September 1644). 6. 1650-1653 Mercurius Politicus (1-8 August, 8-15 August 1650) A Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence (22-29 January, 5-12 March, 12-19 March 1651). The Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings of, and in Relation to the Armies (4-11 April, 11-18 April 1653).

INDEX OF TITLES (PRINT NEWS PAMPHLETS AND NEWSPAPERS)

A continuation of more newes from the Palatinate, A Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence, A relation of the last newes from severall parts of the world, A relation of the weekely occurrences, A true relation of a most desperate murder, A true relation of Go[ds] wonderfull mercies, A true relation of the affaires of Europe, A true relation, of the happy peace concluded by the two mighty princes, A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France A wonder woorth the reading, or a true and faithfull relation of a woman, Affaires of Italy, The, All Alive and Merry; or, the London Daily Post, Amsterdam Courant, An Historical Journal, Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal, Asahi, B. Berington's Evening Post, Bell’s Life in London, Bell’s Weekly Messenger, Bingley’s Journal, or The Universal Gazette, Black Dwarf, Britain, The, British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, British Journal, The, British Journalism Review, British Spy, The, Caledonian Mercury, The, Catholick Intelligence, The, Certaine Informations, Champion English Advertiser, Champion or, the Evening Advertiser, The, China News, China Post,

228

Index of Titles

Common Sense or the Englishman’s Journal, Continuation of our weekely newes, The, Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germanie, […] France, Corante, or, newes from Italy, Germany, […] and Dutchland, Corriere della Sera, Country Journal, Currant Intelligence, The, Currant intelligence: or an impartial account of transactions both forraign and domestick, The, Currant intelligence: or an impartial account of transactions both foreign and domestick, The, Current Intelligence, The, Daily Advertiser, The, Daily Courant, The, Daily Express, Daily Gazetteer and London Advertiser, Daily Gazetteer, Daily Journal, The, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The, Daily Oracle, The, Daily Post, The, Daily Post-Boy, The, Daily Record, Daily Sketch, Daily Star, Daily Telegraph (and Courier), The, Daily Telegraph, The, Daily Universal Register, The, Dawke’s Letter, Dawk's News-letter, Domestick Intelligence, The, Dublin Gazette, Dublin Journal, Economist, Edinburgh Courant, The, Edinburgh Evening Courant, The, Edinburgh Flying Post, The, Edinburgh Gazette, or Scotch Postman, The, Edinburgh Gazette, The, Edinburgh Gazzetteer,

News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis

Edinburgh News-Letter, The, English Courant, The, English Post, Giving an Authentick Account, The, English Post; with News Foreign and Domestick, The, Evening Courant, Evening Post, The, Evening Post: or the New Edinburgh Gazette, Evening Standard, The, Examiner, The, Financial Times, Flying Post, The, Fog’s Weekly Journal, Foreign and Domestick News, Freeholder’s Journal, The, Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, The, General Advertiser, General Evening Post, Gentleman’s Magazine, The, Glasgow Courant, The, Glasgow Journal, The, Gloucester Journal, Grub-Street-Journal, Independent, Intelligence Domestick and Foreign, Intelligence Domestick and Foreign, with the Flying Post, Jyllands-Posten, Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, The, La Repubblica, Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle, Lloyd’s Evening Post, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, The, London Chronicle, London Courant, London Daily Advertiser, London Daily Post, London Daily Post, and General Advertiser, The, London Evening Post, The, London Gazette, The, London Journal, The, London Morning Penny Post,

229

230

Index of Titles

London News-Letter, The, London Post, The, London Spy, Manchester Guardian, The, Manila Bulletin, Manila Times, The, Mercurius Anglicus, Mercurius Aulicus, Mercurius Britanicus, Mercurius Civicus, Mercurius Civicus, Or A True Account, Mercurius civicus: or the City Mercury, Mercurius Fumigosus, Mercurius Politicus, Mercurius Pragmaticus, Mercurius Publicus, Mist’s Weekly Journal, Moderate Intelligencer, The, Moderate, The, Morning Chronicle, Morning Herald, Morning Post, and Daily Advertiser, The, Morning Post and Gazetteer, The, New Edinburgh Gazette, New State of Europe, The, New tydings out of Italie are not yet com, The, New York Herald, New York Times, New York World, Newes from France. Or a relation of a maruellous, Newes from Spain. A trve relation of the lamentable accidents, News of the World, The, Night-Post, The, Nihon Keizai, North Briton, Northern Star, The, Norwich Gazette, Norwich Post, Observer, The, Old England, Old England: or, the National Gazette,

News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis

Old Post-Master, The, Orange Gazette, The, Oxford Gazette, The, Pacquet boat from Holland and Flanders, Pall Mall Gazette, Penny London Post, or, The Morning Advertiser, Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings, The, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippine Star, Political Register, Poor Man’s Guardian, The, Post Boy, The, Post Man, The, Post Man: And the Historical Account, &c., The, Protestant (Domestick) Intelligence, The, Protestant Mercury: Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, The, Public Advertiser, The, Public Ledger, The, Publick Intelligencer, The, Read’s Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, Read’s Weekly Journal, Reynolds’s Newspaper, Scotish Dove, The, Scots Courant, The, Scots Postman: or The Edinburgh Gazette, Scots Postman: or the New Edinburgh Gazette, Spectator, The, St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, St. James’s Post, with the best Occurrences, St. James's Evening Post, The, Standard, The Star, The, Sun, Sunday Times, The, Sydney Morning Herald, The, Times, The, Today, True News; or Mercurius Anglicus, United Daily News Weekly Journal from London, The, Weekly Journal,

231

232

Index of Titles

Weekly Journal, or, British Gazetteer, The, Weekly Journal; or: Saturday’s Post, The, Weekly News-letter, The, Weekly Packet, The, West Country Intelligence, Westminster Gazette, The, Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, Whitehall Evening Post, Worcester Journal, Worcester Postman, World, The Yomiuri

GENERAL INDEX

(Bold = key word in section heading; brackets = keyword in newspaper quotation; FN = keyword in footnote) Accessibility, 115-116, 118-119, 124 Accident, 70-71, 121, (123), (132), (138), FN: 6, 54 Accuracy, 11, 157-159 Address, 20, 30, 36-37, 67, 78, 87, 104, 106, 131 Adverb / Adverbial, 127, 189-190 Advertisement,12, 40, 52-53, 61, 63, 66-69, 71, 73-78, 81, 83, 87-88, 83, 93, 100, 103, 109, 112, 114116,151, 202 Amsterdam, 6, (23) Animadversion, 11 Announcement, 66-67, 71, 73-78, 81, 87, 112, 182, 200 Arrival of mail, 69 Author, 3, 5, 11, 18-20, 27, 30-31, 36, 47, 79-80, 83, 86, 131, 133137, 139-143, 172, 176, 181182, 187-189, 193, 196, 197,199 Authorship, 133, 161, 188 Bill of deaths, 71 Birth notice, 66, 69, 87 Blog / Blogger, 130, 154-157, 168, 186-189, 191-194, 196, 200 Bourne, Nicholas, 8, 9 Breaking news, 154, 156-158 Broadcast, 146, (153), 156, 167,186, (191), FN: 184 Burney Collection, 15, 50-51, 5859, 61-63, 107, FN: 55 Butter, Nathaniel, 7, 9 CADS, 4, 21-22, 201 Charles I, 9, 11, 14

Charles II, 13, 87 Circuit judge, 69 Circulation, 2, 81, 93, 96-97, 101102, 112, 114-115, 150-152, 155, 177, 200, FN: 94 Citizen journalism, 2, 154, 161, 186, FN: 104, 156 Civil War, 10-11, 28, 31, 42, 44, 46, 199, FN: 119 Coffee-house, 55, 93 Commentary, 15, 99, 134, 170-172 Conversationalization, 101, 104, 107, 116-118, 124-130, 141, 202 Coranto, 6-7, 9-16, 18, 22-25, 2834, 36-40, 43-46, 153, 199, FN: 12 Country news, 63, 69 Court proceedings, 12, 69, 71, (72), (86), 99, 120, 129, 142, 177, FN: 137 Crime, 6, 12, 66, 70-71, 83, 87, 131, 142, 181 Cromwell, Oliver, 11, (45) Crosshead, 39, 43 Dateline, 7, 25, 39-40, 69, 75, 7980, 84-85, 118, 199, 202 Death notice, 66, 69, 71-72, 87, 122, 168, FN: 73 Declaration, 67 Diplomatic correspondence, 155, FN: 29 Discourse analysis, 83, 97, 124, 126, 142, 178, FN: 30, 125

234

General Index

Editor / Editorial, 2, 8-9, 12, 16, 21, 23-34, 36-37, 41-42, 47, 52, 79, 80-81, 95, 97-99, 101-102, 104, 106, 109, 120, 126, 131, 133137, 139-143, 146, 148, 152153, 162-164, 185-187, 195, 196, 197, 199, FN: 42, 54, 79, 133, 178, 179 Emotionalization, 101, 114, 116 Essay, 53, 66-67, 79-83, 87, 89, 98, FN: 68 Evening paper, 53, 59, 63, 65, 93 Evidence, 8, 9, 19, 41, 138, 180, 183, 186 Feature article /story, 124, 151, 167, 170, 172, 191, 193, FN: 113 Florence Early English Newspapers Corpus (FEEN), 3, 13-18, 20, 26, 28, 31-32, 35, 38, 41-45, 47, 117, 225-226, FN: 40 Foreign news, 9-11, 25, 40, 48, 53, 61, 63, 66, 67-69, 87, 186, 199, FN: 55 Gainsford, Thomas, 9, 19-21, 33 Genre, 20, 66, 87-88, 108, 112-113, 126-127, 130, 138, 164, 166, 172, 174, 176, 183, 184, 191, 194, FN: 113 Global news, 148-149 Hard news, 7, 71, 82-83, 103-104, 108, 112, FN: 20 Heading, 39-40, 85, 118, 167, FN: 38, 124 Headline, 3, 39, 40-42, 46, 52, 69, 75-76, 84-85, 102, 114-115, 117, 118- 120, 124, 128, 139, 141-142, 145, 147, 152, 157, 178-179, 183, 184, 187, 189, 195, 202, FN: 37, 119, 124, 150 Heads, 3, 5, 37-43, 47-48, 118-119, 122, 124, 193, FN: 118, 124 Holland, 6, 13, (23), 39, (43), (58) Holland, Abraham, FN: 24 Home news, 12, 66, 67-70, 74, 85, 87, 112 House style, 88

Human interest, 83, 99, 104, 106, 114, 116, 123 Ideology, 30, 178 Image, 102, 148, 167-168, 183-185 Impartiality, 4, 176-177, 181 Imperative, 3, 140-141 Internet, 2, 5-6, 39, 42, 43, 107, 130, 143, 146-150, 153-154, 161162, 164, 168, 182, 186, 188, 194-195, 200 Inverted pyramid, 2, 100, 176-177, 200 Irish newspaper, 62 Keyword, 168, 182, 187 L’Estrange, Roger, 13 Letter, (18), (19), (23), 25, (26), (27), 28, 31-37, (39), 43, 55, 57, 62, (65), 66-67, 69, 73, 79-81, 85-88, 96, 102, 104, 112, 135, 137,142, 151, 163, 173, FN: 53, 95, 133, 137 Letter (of news), 31, 55, 57 Letter to the editor, 79-80, 163 Lexical diversity, 83 Licensing Act, 56, 91, 110 London news, 69 London paper, 58, 61, 11, 93, 110, FN: 50, 58 London, 7, 11, 14, 17, (28), (37), 50, 53-54, 57-58, 59, 61-62, 65, 69, (74), 84-85, 97, 146, FN: 110 Lottery result, 69 Mainstream journalism, 148,154158, 161, 186, 193, FN: 148 Marginalia, 3, 5, 37-38, 44-46 Muddiman, Henry, 13 Naming practice, 127, 129 Nedham, Marchamont, 12-15, 28, 31, 47 New Journalism, 3, 95, 98-100, 105, 119, 125, 134, 138, 143 News package, 2, 4, 113, 123-124, 153, 180, 182-186, 194, 196, FN: 113 News piece, 2, 179, 180, 182-186, 191, FN: 179

News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis News section, 63, 67-68, 73, 77, 85, 87, 108 Newsbook, 10-18, 25-31, 34-44, 47, 51, 54-56, 128, 153, Newspaper profile, 67, 81-82, 114115 News report, 2, 3, 7, 9, 18, 25, 33, 43, 47, 82, 86, 94, 100, 108-110, 112-113, 124, 126, 132, 134, 138, 140, 142-143, 145, 146147, 149, 151, 153, 162-165, 167-168, 170-171,174-181, 186, 188, 195, 199-200, FN: 133 Newssheet, 3, 5-9, 14, 16, 23, 30, 39 News story, 2, 8, 29, 40, 42, 100, 117, 119, 121, 155, 157, 167, 172, 177, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187, 196, FN: 99, 112, 124 News value, 39, 82, 99 Objectivity, 19, 20, 27, 30, 138, 145, 175-177, 180, 181, 196, FN: 20 Occasional news pamphlet, FN: 6 Opinion, 99, 102, (135), 154, 160, 176, 192, 195 Orality, 102, 116, 124-126, 140-141 Oxford, 14, 15, (26), (25), 50, 54, 61, (86) Paragraph, 10, 11, 43, 86, 100, 112, 118-119, 121, 166, 172, 199, FN: 86, 124 Personalization, 34, 37, 101, 102, 104, 114, 116, 125, 135, 143, 181, FN: 125 Perspective, 2, 4, 19, 122, 132, 138, 142, 165, 175, 176-182, 186, 196, FN: 132 Popular paper / press, 3, 82, 86-87, 91, 94, 95-98, 102-108, 110, 113-116, 120, 124-125, 128129, 139-141, 152, 202, FN: 104, 113, 114 Popularization, 9, 91, 103, 105-107, 113, 118, 143, 200 Proclamation, 67, 78, 83, 87, FN: 52

235

Professional, 2, 4, 6, 15, 20, 23, 27, 32, 37, 94, 96, 98-99, 103, 133, 138, 142, 154-158, 161-163, 186-189, 191, 195, 196, 200, FN: 96, 133 Pronoun, 3, 11, 18-37, 42, 46, 86, 127, 130-132, 134-140, 189, 190-194, 201, FN: 8, 19 Provincial newspaper, 60-62 Publisher, 5, 7, 9, 13, 23-25, 30, 56, 79, 92, 95, 146, 172 Qualitative analysis, 4, 20-21, 36, 117, 118, 126, 129, 131, 143, 175, 194, 201 Quality paper / press, 3, 12, 82, 84, 86, 91, 95, 114-115, 139, 151152, 177, 181, 202, FN: 115 Quantitative analysis, 4, 20-21, 30, 35-36, 47, 117, 118, 126, 129130, 136, 143, 175, 188, 194, 201 Quotation, 3, 84, 121-122, 125, 129, 134-136, 138, 140, 141-142, 192-193, FN: 53, 132 Radical paper, 95-98, 104-105, FN: 114 Readership, 20, 30, 34, 71, 82-83, 86, 97, 104, 114-115, 118, 126, 137-138, 150, 152, 176, 178, 186, 195-196, FN: 104 Representativity, 110, 111, 113, 174, 201 Rostock Newspaper Corpus (RNC), 3, 50, 51, 108-109, 110-114, 117-118, 120, 124, 128-130, 132, 134-141, 143, FN: 110, 113-114, 133 Scottish newspaper, 62 Sentence length, 86-87, 119 Shipping news, 66, 68, 69-70, 85, 87 Social Network, 3, 4, 153-155, 161, 163, 195 Socio-historical profile, 81 Soft news, 83, 71, 112, 114, 122123, 138

236

General Index

Source (of news), 39, 72, 86, 88, 99, 100, 103, 115, 147, 153, 157, 161, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 172-173, 182, 185-186, 188 Speech and thought representation, 3, 85 Spelling, 88-89, 128, FN: 11 Stamp Act, 65, 91-93, 95, FN: 52 Star Chamber, 10 Stylistics, 83 Subjectivity, 2, 11, 19-20, 27, 145, 175-176, 178 Sunday paper, 93, 95-97, 102, 105, 124, 150 Tabloidization, 3, 101, 103, 106, 200 Term of address, 25, 28, 32-37, 7980, 136-138, 182, 193 Text class, 51, 66-73, 76-79, 81, 8384, 87, 89, 113, 202 Text genre, 87 Text linguistics, 83

Text type, 3, 33, 37, 66 Text-end signal, 71, 75 Thirty Years War, 7 Tri-weekly, 53, 57, 59-60, 65, 82, 89 Tweet, 154, 182-183, 196, 200 Unmediated journalism, 4, 148, 150, 153-155 Victorian papers / press, 95, 99, 105, 129, 141-142 Vocabulary (of news), 70, 73, 83, 100 (>‘lexical’) Wedding, 66, 87, (123) Writer, 2, 5-8, 10-11, 18-21, 23-29, 31-32, 37, 46, 47, 95, 99, 145, 150, 173, 176, 178-181, 192195, 202, FN: 38, 133 YouTube, 154-155, 196 ZEN Corpus (ZEN), 3, 13, 50-53, 56- 65, 67-73, 78-81, 83-89, 109, 111-113, 118, 143