Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus

Description

Evaluation is the linguistic expression of speaker/writer opinion, and has only recently become the focus of linguistic analysis. This book presents the first corpus-based account of evaluation; one hundred newspaper articles collated to form a 70,000 word comparable corpus, drawn from both tabloid and broadsheet media. The book provides detailed explanations and justifications of the underlying framework of evaluation, as well as demonstrating how this is part of the larger framework of media discourse. Unlike many other linguistic analyses of media language, it makes frequent reference to the production circumstances of newspaper discourse, in particular the so-called 'news values' that shape the creation of the news. Cutting-edge and insightful, Evaluation in Media Discourse will be of interest to academics and researchers in corpus linguistics and media discourse.

Monika Bednarek is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia.

The author skillfully combines the quantitative calculations of distrubution of evaluations and qualitative comments on their discourse functions. The author ensured the validity of her choice of what as marked as evaluative also by consulting previous research, native speakers, the Bank of English and corpus-based dictionary. Further strengths of Bednarek's approach are that it is eclectic and does not require commitment to a particular theory of grammar. * Discourse Studies *