The volume deals with a phenomenon that has so far received little attention, but is all the more relevant, especially from a linguistic perspective: press releases at the intersection of two or more ...languages and cultures. The subject matter is the current German newspaper language and newspaper communication in various multilingual contexts. The book thus makes an empirical contribution to research into the basic typological structures and constitutive characteristics of foreign German media using system and usage linguistic approaches.
The Travel section of a newspaper is composed of texts which purport to at least partly comply with the ethical value of journalistic objectivity, yet the border between this type of writing and the ...overtly promotional texts produced in the tourism sector is somewhat blurred. This paper compares linguistic features in samples of text from Tourist Board websites and the Travel section and nine other sections of The Guardian to determine whether Travel Journalism can be categorised as a type of journalism, or whether it bears distinct similarities to Tourism Discourse. The results suggest that Travel Journalism differs from the other newspaper sections and is quite similar to the Language of Tourism on the basis of some features. However, in relation to others, it is decidedly different, thereby suggesting that Travel Journalism can be cleared of the allegation of being unduly influenced by the texts produced by the tourism industry.
The article provides an analysis of various aspects of intensification in the English language (colloquial and newspaper), intensifying adverbs in particular. The processes of grammaticalisation and ...delexicalisation observed in the evolution of intensifying adverbs are described. The author also looks into the renewal and boundedness of intensifying adverbs, provides an overview of modern classifications of intensifying adverbs, and offers statistics on the frequency of occurrence of intensifying adverbs to illustrate their usage in spoken discourse and newspaper language. The findings assume that less intensification is used in written discourse whereas more intensification is employed in spoken discourse, which suggests that the decline in intensification is higher as the formality of the register increases, and vice versa.
Although Indian English is the best-documented South Asian English, its diachronic development has not been described to a great extent. The present study begins to address this gap by offering a ...real-time perspective on the evolution of modals and semi-modals in Indian English. It sketches the changes in the frequency of modals and semi-modals in three corpora of Indian newspaper texts from 1939, 1968, and the early 2000s. Changes in the frequency of eleven modals and eleven semi-modals are found to be similar to the trends previously observed for written American and British English: semi-modals, as well as the modals can, could, and would, rise greatly in frequency. An analysis of the types of modality expressed by individual modal verbs provides in-depth insights into shifts in Indian English during the period. The study’s findings raise methodological and theoretical considerations for the diachronic study of modality in corpora in English generally: the increasing amount of direct quotation in news reportage partly accounts for a rise in modal frequency in this subgenre, which constitutes a confounding aspect seldom articulated in the study of newspaper language. Individual modal verbs exhibit different directions and speeds of change that are not reflected in the trajectory of modals as a category, demonstrating that an aggregate measure is not a suitable point of comparison between varieties to determine their degree of similarity or difference in terms of modal verb usage.
Zusammenfassung
Der Aufsatz behandelt einen in der Medienlinguistik noch weitgehend unerforschten Zeitungstyp: die Presse deutsch(sprachig)er Minderheiten im Ausland. Im Sinne eines Werkstattberichts ...fasst der Beitrag das Untersuchungsdesign, die zentralen Inhaltsstrukturen bzw. -elemente sowie die bisherigen Beobachtungen und Ergebnisse eines aktuellen Forschungsprojekts mit Überblickscharakter zusammen und stellt sie zur Diskussion. Am Beispiel von drei Minderheitenzeitungen aus Russland, Kasachstan und Ungarn konnte die explorative Studie u. a. zu folgenden Befunden gelangen: (1) Aufgrund von Mehrsprachigkeit und Mehrschriftlichkeit bildet vor allem eine Bandbreite sprachkontaktinduzierter Phänomene das wichtigste Alleinstellungsmerkmal dieser Zeitungen. (2) Es liegen viele etwas eklektische und stilistisch-pragmatisch inkonsistente Texte vor. (3) Inhaltliche und kulturinduzierte Auffälligkeiten prägen das Gesamtbild des untersuchten medialen Mikrokosmos. (4) Die Kompetenzbesonderheiten der mehrsprachigen Textproduzenten färben auf die Textgestaltung ab.
Standard procedures for the treatment of collocates, which involve the elaboration of lists of collocates on a two-by-two basis, are far from optimum for the study of connectivity, i.e. observing ...whether these collocates in turn display a tendency to co-occur or not. This paper explores an alternative strategy that has garnered considerable interest in recent years: that of using Social Network Analysis procedures. Lists of collocates (concgrams) were extracted from a one million word corpus of crime journalism using standard techniques. Gephi software was then used to transform the list of collocates into a network. A small number of collocate pairs were seen to be isolates, i.e. collocating only with each other, while the majority belonged to the giant component, composed of pairs in which at least one member collocates with at least one other word. Modules (clusters of highly interconnected collocates) were identified; these were seen to pertain to specific subject areas. The corpus was then re-examined to see where these clusters of collocates occurred, and co-occurred, and to gauge how much this technique may tell us about the ‘aboutness’ of particular texts.
There has been no lack of research on the variation of comparative adjective forms in contemporary English, but our understanding of comparison strategies is still limited, with respect to individual ...patterns of adjectives, as well as sociolinguistic factors (e.g. formality). This article presents a quantitative investigation of selected disyllabic adjectives in comparison (i.e. ample, bitter, common, complete, costly, deadly, empty, friendly, kindly, likely, obscure, remote, robust, severe, simple, sober, wealthy), based on the 2001-2005 issues of two different types of newspapers in British English (i.e. Daily Mail and The Independent). Our analysis reveals that, although previous studies have shown that some factors have an effect on the comparative alternation between the inflectional and periphrastic forms (e.g. costlier and more costly, respectively), these factors do not affect all adjectives equally. We also found that, for many adjectives, periphrastic comparison is more likely to be preferred in the less formal newspaper (i.e. Daily Mail). The present study also explores the strategies employed when selecting comparative forms for superlative adjectives and shows that factors which are influential on the comparative formation are not always effective on the superlative comparison.
Die Studie arbeitete zentrale sprachliche Profilmerkmale der Deutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung (DAZ) in Kasachstan heraus und lieferte dabei auch einen Beitrag zur Erschließung von Manifestationen der ...Kulturalität im analysierten interkulturellen Mediendiskurs. Der verwendete Ansatz war – im Denkrahmen der interkulturellen Linguistik – deskriptiv und vorrangig variations- bzw. kontaktorientiert. Die Besonderheit der Zeitung besteht vor allem darin, dass ihre Sprache praktisch monolingual deutsch ist, während ihr kulturelles Umfeld eine kasachisch-russische Prägung aufweist. Die daraus resultierende konkrete Sprachverwendung in der DAZ wurde unter Nutzung des Salienz-Konzeptes betrachtet. Im ausgewerteten Korpus des Jahrgangs 2017 wurden sprachbezogene Salienzen auf nahezu allen Ebenen herausgearbeitet, allen voran in Lexik und Phraseologie, Grammatik, Stil, Grafie sowie Typografie. Die eruierten Verwendungsbesonderheiten resultieren aus drei Prozessen typologisch unterschiedlicher Art: (1) aus prototypischen Sprachkontaktmechanismen, also aus Transfers oder Nachahmungen von Elementen, Strukturen und Modellen der Kontaktsprachen Russisch und Kasachisch; (2) aus Verfremdungsprozessen, z. B. Kontrastverschiebungen oder -übertreibungen, die sich aus einer unsicheren Beherrschung der Zielsprache Deutsch, etwa durch Übergeneralisierung des Sprachsystems, ergeben; (3) aus Normverletzungen aufgrund von Unachtsamkeit, d. h. Flüchtigkeitsfehler bzw. problematische oder grenzwertige Formulierungen, die selbst bei Textproduzenten mit exzellenter (nativer) Sprachbeherrschung vorkommen. Es ist nachgewiesen worden, dass quantitativ die mehrsprachigkeits-, kontakt- und/oder kompetenzbedingten Auffälligkeiten überwiegen, wobei sich der sprachliche Kontakteinfluss des Russischen als größer erwies als der des Kasachischen. Auf dieser Basis konnte der Beitrag die DAZ als eine mehrfach kulturasymmetrische Grenzgänger-Zeitung mit einer spezifischen Form von Mehrschriftlichkeit erfassen und beschreiben.
Newspaper preferences for particular formats of speech presentation differ and they change in the course of time. In this contribution we focus on The Times and trace such developments in the ...formative years of the modern Anglo-American newspapers, from 1833 to 1988. We extracted data from The Times Digital Archive in six samples of roughly 5000 words at intervals of 31 years and analysed the texts manually for instances of reported speech. Our analysis shows that the focus has shifted from the presentation of speech events as coherent wholes in earlier newspapers towards a more selective use of individual statements that summarise an event or characterise it from different angles. And it also shows that the frequency of indirect forms of discourse presentation decreases over the years in favour of direct forms. This gives further support to the claim that in terms of discourse presentation broadsheets slowly develop into the direction spearheaded by tabloids.
PDF
