In a world in which advanced communication technologies have made the reporting of disasters and conflicts (also in the form of breaking news) a familiar and 'normalised' activity, the information we present here about television news reporting of the 2003 war in Iraq has implications that go beyond this particular conflict. Evaluation and Stance in War News functions as a tool kit for the critical evaluation of language in the news, both as raw data in need of interpretation and as carefully packaged products of 'information management' in need of 'unpacking'. The chapters offer an array of theoretical and empirical instruments for revealing, identifying, sifting, weighing and connecting patterns of language use that construct messages. These messages carry with them world views and value systems that can either create an ever wider divide or serve to build bridges between peoples and countries.

The ownership and funding of media organisations inevitably affects what news we receive everyday. But is public or private ownership better? Looking at how news is constructed in different contexts under public and commercial models, this book uses global comparative examples to give a topical insight into the world of broadcasting today.

The updated and revised edition of this volume maintains its focus on the dialectic interrelation between ‘news’ and ‘change’. News is intended as a textual type in its evolutionary – and revolutionary – development, while change is discussed with reference to the form, content and structure of news texts. The news texts in question range from the first forms of periodical news in the seventeenth century up to the news blogs and social media of the present day. Divided into four chapters, representing key historical moments in the process of news writing, each chapter makes use of a set of corpora specifically designed to suit the needs of scholars working in those particular fields. Topics that the authors examine include pronominal usage and the interrelationship between news writer and reader, heads and headlines, the language of advertisements and other text classes, the trend towards conversationalization, and impartiality and ‘perspective’ in modern-day news. These and other topics, coupled with the varying corpora that are exploited to analyse them, call into question basic methodological issues that are examined from different perspectives. Throughout the volume, the authors contextualise the news publications of the day so as to better understand the continuous process of adjustment and renewal that news texts are subject to over time.

The Discourse of News Values breaks new ground in news media research in offering the first book-length treatment of the discursive construction of news values through words and images. Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed empirical analysis to introduce their innovative analytical framework: discursive news values analysis (DNVA). DNVA allows researchers to systematically investigate how reported events are "sold" to audiences as "news" (made newsworthy) through the semiotic resources of language and image. With an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach, The Discourse of News Values analyzes authentic news discourse (both language and images) from around the English-speaking world through three new case studies: one that analyzes newsworthiness around the topic of cycling/cyclists; another that analyzes news values in images disseminated by news media organizations via Facebook; and a third that focuses on news values in "most shared" news items. Introducing readers to the possibilities of both DNVA and corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (CAMDA), The Discourse of News Values brings together corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis in a stimulating and unique book for researchers in Linguistics, Semiotics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Media/Journalism Studies.

Bringing together contributions from a team of international scholars, this pioneering book applies theories and approaches from linguistics, such as discourse analysis and pragmatics, to analyse the media and online political discourses of both conflict and peace processes. By analysing case studies as globally diverse as Germany, the USA, Nigeria, Iraq, Korea and Libya, and across a range of genres such as TV news channels, online reporting and traditional newspapers, the chapters collectively show how news discourse can be powerful in mobilizing public support for war or violence, or for conflict resolution, through the linguistic representation of certain groups. It explores the consequences of this 'framing' effect, and shows how peace journalism can be achieved through a non-violent approach to reporting conflict. It will therefore serve as an essential resource for students, scholars and experts in media and communication studies, conflict and peace studies, international relations, linguistics and political science.

This volume illustrates the role of language in political action by analyzing the discourse of various British and US institutions on the war in Iraq. It combines quantitative methods, based on a sophisticated modular corpus in order to identify regularly occurring lexical and semantic patterns, and qualitative context-based discourse analysis.

Now reissued and retypeset, this canonical book explores the role of language and images in newspaper, radio, online and television news. The authors introduce useful frameworks for analysing language, image and the interaction between the two, and illustrate these with authentic news stories from around the English-speaking world, ranging from the Oktoberfest to environmental disasters to the killing of Osama bin Laden. This analysis persuasively illustrates how events are retold in the news and made 'newsworthy' through both language and image. This clearly written and accessible introduction to news discourse is essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers in linguistics, media and journalism studies and semiotics.

This edited collection makes a unique contribution to analyses of the changing nature and challenges of mediated political communication, through a distinctive comparative discourse analytical approach. The book explores how politics is performed and discursively constructed in television news and current affairs in five countries (France, Greece, Italy, Sweden and the UK) and focuses on a moment in time in European politics characterized by challenging tensions; increased Euroscepticism, questioning of mainstream politics; accentuated gaps between the elite and the citizens, and polarizations between member states. Emphasising the performative and discursive dimensions of political communication, the chapters provide a detailed comparative analysis that is centred around three themes: how symbolic representations of politics are shaped by journalistic practices, genres and styles of news reporting; the language and performances of mainstream and populist political leaders; and the participation and representation of citizens’ voices.

The present volume includes a selection of 20 papers from the 31st Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), held in Giessen (Germany) in May 2010. The conference topic was “Corpus linguistics and variation in English”. All the papers included in the present Conference Proceedings capture aspects of variation in language use on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and/or new methods of utilising corpora for the description of language variation. Of particular interest are the five plenary papers that are included in the present volume, focusing on corpus-based approaches to variation in language from different disciplinary perspectives: Stefan Th. Gries (quantitative-statistical descriptions of variation and corpora), Michaela Mahlberg (stylistic variation and corpora), Miriam Meyerhoff (variational sociolinguistics and corpora), Edgar W. Schneider (regional variation and corpora) and Elizabeth C. Traugott (historical variation/grammaticalization and corpora).

Languages, diversity and power: these are the concepts running through all chapters in this volume. Rooted in linguistics, translation studies and literary studies, often informed by cultural and political studies, postcolonial theory and history, the contributions here tackle the thorny issue of power relations as expressed, enforced, dismissed through the use of language(s). From the British press, to power relations as represented in TV series set in courtrooms, and from language-power intersections in the translation of Italian post-war cinema to power enforcement through film-making in Africa, the volume spans decades and continents, providing in-depth analyses of a host of contexts, facts, actions. As such, it will be of particular interest to scholars and students in linguistics, translation and cultural studies.