Historical Corpus Stylistics: Media, Technology and Change

Description

This book analyzes how news discourse was shaped over time by external factors, such as the historical context, news production, technological innovation and current affairs, and as such both conformed to and deviated from generic conventions. Using data from a newspaper corpus, it offers the first empirical study into the development of style in early mass media. In this analysis, media style appears as a dynamic concept which is highly sensitive to innovative approaches towards making news not only informative but also entertaining to read. This cutting-edge survey will be of interest to academics researching corpus linguistics, media discourse and stylistics.

Patrick Studer is a Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Zurich and a Researcher in Linguistics at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Patrick Studer is one of the world's leading experts in early English newspapers. He has an intimate and detailed knowledge of both their content matters and their stylistic peculiarities. In this book he provides a rich and detailed introduction to these newspapers within their historical and socio-cultural context and he develops a set of sophisticated corpus-stylistic tools necessary for their analysis. There is a lot to learn not only about newspapers in eighteenth-century England but also about the English language at the turning point from Early Modern English to Present-day English. -- Andreas H. Jucker, Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland This is an outstanding book: theoretically and methodologically innovative yet well-anchored in the literature; wide-ranging yet systematic and detailed. It makes a real contribution to diverse fields. It sheds light on how corpus-based approaches can be deployed in the study of style, how styles interact with their social and pragmatic contexts and how change in style comes about ... All this is written up in polished prose. -- Dr Jonathan Culpeper, University of Lancaster, UK Briefly reviewed in the Year's work in English Studies journal, vol 89, No. 1