1.4. An outline of the analysis of a newspaper writing

1.4.1. To fully understand the linguo-stylistic peculiarities of English newspaper style it will be sufficient to analyse the two basic newspaper genres, namely, a news report as best illustrating a purely objective, matter-of-fact way of presenting information, on the one hand, and a feature article as a vehicle of subjective interpretation and appraisal, on the other.

The first step in the analysis of a newspaper writing is to distinguish between the above two newspaper genres and to justify your choice. It is recommended that you should do it in accordance with the following plan:

1. to characterize the type of information a newspaper item conveys and the author’s attitude towards it;

2. to analyse the arrangement (layout) of the information conveyed (the division into physical and conceptual paragraphs, the presence of the so-called ‘lead’);

3. to highlight the most salient linguo-stylistic features of a newspaper writing in question, including lexical and certain grammatical ones.

4. to comment upon linguo-stylistic peculiarities of a headline and subheadings (if any);

5. to make a conclusion concerning the genre of a newspaper writing under analysis.

1.4.2. Further analysis of a newspaper text presupposes the implementation of a textlinguistic approach to it. Like any text, a newspaper text, no matter what genre it belongs to, is characterized by functional-communicative, structural and semantic wholeness which, first and foremost, manifests itself in the unity of its compositional structure and the logico-semantic integrity of its content. So, it is expedient to focus on the analysis of a newspaper text in terms of such important text categories as informativity and cohesion turning, first of all, to various lexical means of cohesion which contribute to the logico-semantic wholeness of a text.

Assignements for self-control

Make sure you can answer these questions.

1. What kind of publications can be regarded as immediate forerunners of the British press?

2. What were the first, more or less, regular series of English newspapers and why did they cease publication or were suppressed?

3. What was the first British newspaper supported by the Government and what kind of information did it carry?

4. What were the requirements of the publishers imposed on the first English daily newspaper?

5. When did the British newspaper come to be very much like what it is today?

6. What factors left an indelible mark on newspaper English and what was it vigorously criticized for by purists in the field of language use?

7. When did the newspaper English develop into a separate functional style and what features is it characterized by?

8. What are the two main functions of modern English newspaper and what newspaper genres serve as main vehicles of these functions?

9. Characterize the main streams in the British press and the kind of newspapers they are represented by?

10. Dwell on the differences between tabloids and broadsheets.