Monika Bednarek

Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological framework for analysing news discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and beyond

This article introduces a new framework for the analysis of news discourse to scholars in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and beyond. It emphasises the importance of news values for linguistic analysis and encourages a constructivist approach to their analysis. The new methodological framework is situated within what the authors call a ‘discursive’ approach to news values. From this perspective, news values are seen as values that exist in and are constructed through discourse, and the primary research interest is in how texts construct newsworthiness through multimodal resources. This article first introduces resources that are used to construe news values in English-language news discourse, before illustrating the framework through two case studies of a 70,000-word corpus of British news discourse. The framework itself is intended for both multimodal discourse analysis and corpus linguistic analysis, although this article focuses more on the integration of corpus linguistic techniques. Thus, the discursive approach ties in well with two recent trends in CDA – towards multimodal and towards corpus-assisted discourse analysis. More specifically, the case studies show that corpus linguistic techniques can identify conventionalised discursive devices that are repeatedly used in news discourse to construct and perpetuate an ideology of newsworthiness. They further show that such techniques can provide a useful indication of the discursive construction of newsworthiness around a specific topic, event or news actor. The article concludes with an outline of further applications of the framework for (critical) linguistic analyses of news discourse.

Epistemological positioning and evidentiality in English news discourse: A text-driven approach*

Abstract This paper uses a text-driven approach to explore epistemological positioning (the expression of assessments concerning knowledge) in English newspapers. The notion of epistemological positioning (EP) often overlaps with evidentiality—the linguistic marking of the basis of speaker/writer knowledge. This is a relatively modern concept in linguistics and, compared to the amount of research it has attracted concerning other languages, it has been somewhat neglected in research focusing on English. Newspaper texts are a particularly good source for looking into EP and evidentiality, because the news story is a genre that is preoccupied with knowledge. The analysis shows that EP in English can be very complex, and that the distinction between attribution and averral (Sinclair 1988) needs to be taken into account when discussing it in naturally occurring texts (particularly in news texts). The resulting elements of EP that are identified for the English language offer a first glance at the possibilities to express EP in English, and open up future research on EP in different registers and text types.

Semantic preference and semantic prosody re-examined

Abstract In this paper I want to re-examine the key corpus-linguistic notion of semantic preference. This is defined here as the collocation of a lexical item with items from a specific (more or less general) semantic subset. The article aims to throw some light on the term semantic preference, and to examine in more detail some aspects of semantic preference that are frequently neglected in research. It also discusses how semantic preference interacts with syntax and meaning, and what happens when semantic preferences are not ‘realized’ in context. Finally, it seeks to illuminate the distinction between semantic preference and semantic prosody, and points to future research in this area.

Rethinking news values: What a discursive approach can tell us about the construction of news discourse and news photography:

The study of news values/factors has a long and rich history in journalism and communications research. Conceptually, they encompass not only the newsworthy aspects of happenings or news actors but also external aspects that impact journalism practice, such as the influence of proprietors or advertisers, meeting deadlines or competition among news providers to get exclusive stories. Some view news values as existing in the actual events and people who are reported on in the news, that is, in events in their material reality (a material perspective). Others conceive news values as existing in the minds of journalists (a cognitive perspective). News values are also constructed in the discourses involved in the production of news (a discursive perspective). The focus in this article is on this third perspective, with the aim of demonstrating what a discursive approach to news values can add to the two other, theoretical and analytical perspectives. The article has an additional focus on the much neglected area of visual analysis and investigates the construction of news values in news photography.

Playing with environmental stories in the news — good or bad practice?

The aim of this article is to analyse environmental reporting in the Australian broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald. The focus is on a particular kind of new, multisemiotic news story genre that appears regularly in this newspaper, and that makes use of word-image play. Using a social semiotic framework and employing Appraisal theory, we analyse a corpus of 40 stories in terms of evaluative meanings in heading, image and caption, and interpret the significance of our findings in terms of both Critical Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis. In particular, we question whether the playing with environmental stories in the news, and the resulting clash between the humorousness of the play and the seriousness of the reported environmental event, is good or bad practice. With its multisemiotic focus, this article aims to make a significant and innovative contribution to the emerging field of ecolinguistics, and the development of Appraisal theory.

Expressivity and televisual characterization

This article discusses expressivity (emotion, attitude, ideology) in televisual characterization. Drawing on views from professional practice (scriptwriting handbooks), media/television studies and stylistics, it first provides an overview of televisual characterization before arguing for the usefulness of considering expressive meanings in its analysis. The article then introduces linguistic and paralinguistic expressive resources, and a model for analysing expressive character identity is briefly described which aims to combine semiotic and cognitive (Culpeper, 2001) aspects as well as micro-, meso- and macro-levels of analysis. Expressive identity is also discussed with respect to dynamics, stability, individual and social identity. Quantitative and qualitative linguistic studies of characterization are also considered. The aim of the article is to contribute to research on expressivity in stylistics and to provide a springboard for future research on televisual characterization.

How can computer-based methods help researchers to investigate news values in large datasets? A corpus linguistic study of the construction of newsworthiness in the reporting on Hurricane Katrina

This article uses a 36-million word corpus of news reporting on Hurricane Katrina in the United States to explore how computer-based methods can help researchers to investigate the construction of newsworthiness. It makes use of Bednarek and Caple’s discursive approach to the analysis of news values, and is both exploratory and evaluative in nature. One aim is to test and evaluate the integration of corpus techniques in applying discursive news values analysis (DNVA). We employ and evaluate corpus techniques that have not been tested previously in relation to the large-scale analysis of news values. These techniques include tagged lemma frequencies, collocation, key part-of-speech tags (POStags) and key semantic tags. A secondary aim is to gain insights into how a specific happening – Hurricane Katrina – was linguistically constructed as newsworthy in major American news media outlets, thus also making a contribution to ecolinguistics.

‘And they all look just the same’? A quantitative survey of television title sequences

This article describes the variation in title sequences for American television series (a sequence of moving images and sound at the beginning of a television series). Using a quantitative survey of 50 contemporary fictional television series, it explores key features of the television title sequence – such as length, credits, characters, sound and style – and relates these to its functional characteristics. In so doing, the article provides a synchronic snapshot of a significant contemporary cultural product that viewers regularly engage with and enjoy. The survey not only shows the variation inherent in these cultural products, but also pinpoints areas that are worth investigating more closely and in depth.

Double-take: Unpacking the play in the image-nuclear news story

This paper explores the complex cultural and institutional practice of ‘playing’ and ‘bonding’ with the reader in the Australian print-media, as exemplified through a new news story genre in The Sydney Morning Herald, where events are presented as short, witty news stories with a heading, a dominant photograph and a caption. This is termed the image-nuclear news story. In these stories the heading and image enter into a verbal-visual play that relies on the manipulation of common (often idiomatic) expressions, while the caption elaborates on the story’s news value. Through this play newspapers construe a particular kind of reader, who fulfils certain expectations as far as different types of knowledge (linguistic, cultural, semiotic) are concerned. To analyze the intertextual and multisemiotic play and its interpretation by readers, this article makes use of corpus linguistic methodology and theory, in particular compositional (‘open-choice’) and non-compositional (‘idiom’) principles of interpretation. The analyses show how readers’ linguistic experience enables them to unpack the play in the image-nuclear news story, allowing them to ‘bond’ with the newspaper, and be part of the linguistic and cultural (reading) community construed by this news story genre. As newspaper circulation is falling, creating solidarity with the reader in the hope of maintaining their loyalty is essential to the survival of newspapers, and, arguably, getting them to participate in multisemiotic play is one way of doing so.

“Wicked” women in contemporary pop culture: “bad” language and gender in Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Saving Grace

Abstract In this article I discuss “wicked” women in contemporary pop culture, analyzing the language of the “heroines,” or protagonists, of three popular American television series: Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Saving Grace. All feature female characters who are “flawed” in some way and can be described as “non-conforming,” since they engage in behavior that would be socially and morally condemned – they deal in drugs (Weeds), are addicted to pills (Nurse Jackie), or are alcoholics (Saving Grace). While this has attracted some comment in the mainstream media, such comments are not based on any empirical research and have tended to center on these women’s behavior. In contrast, the approach taken here focuses on their linguistic practices, in particular their use of “bad language,” including taboo words and swearing. The analyses show that all three female protagonists challenge stereotypical expectations about appropriate “feminine” behavior for white heterosexual Anglo-American women through their use of “bad language,” while the impact of such cultural representations depends on a range of factors.