The aim of this paper is to study a range of widely spread linguistic means through which quality papers from Italy and the United States of America represent each other’s country, namely headlines (Mansfield 2006) and stance adverbials (Conrad and Biber 2000), in an attempt to identify the discursive resources enabling journalists to construct their professional “persona” while gazing at the ‘other’. The study is based on two synchronic comparable small corpora amounting to 150,021 words altogether. On the one hand, the so-called USpress, including 115 articles from both The Washington Post (WP) and The New York Times (NYT) about Italy; on the other hand, the Itpress, featuring 118 articles from Il Corriere della Sera (CS) and La Repubblica (Rep) about the Unites States. The two corpora cover a time span ranging from the previous six weeks – as of corpus design, i.e. October-November 2010 – to the previous year. Moreover, only title and running text of articles were collected for each text.On a methodological note, the study was characterized by two main stages. The first one lay in the manual study of headlines as the tool employed by journalists to set the scene for their narrative, with the aim of focusing on recurrent pragmatic features and the overall prevalence of either a denotative or a connotative component making the writer’s orientation explicit. In the second stage of the analysis, stance adverbials were investigated both quantitatively by means of computer-assisted tools, and qualitatively, with particular emphasis on their textual functions (e.g. hedging and boosting) as interpersonal attitude markers through which journalists negotiate the transmission of news they foreground as salient. For example, findings show that the key-distinction between denotative and connotative ones proved worth investigating, in that it shows how headlines may reveal much about authorial positioning in writing practices across newspapers. Denotative headlines are by far the most widely spread, because they represent 66.6 % of those in the WP, 64.8% of those of the CS, and 59.3% of the total headlines in Rep; on the contrary, connotative headlines are prominently attested in the NYT (59.3%).
The 'other's' gaze: a corpus study of discursive practices in American and Italian newspapers / Mazzi, Davide. - STAMPA. - 1:(2011), pp. 48-52. (Intervento presentato al convegno Discursive practices and textual realizations in organizational communication: product and process, frontstage and backstage tenutosi a Milano nel 3-4 Novembre 2011).
The 'other's' gaze: a corpus study of discursive practices in American and Italian newspapers
MAZZI, Davide
2011
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to study a range of widely spread linguistic means through which quality papers from Italy and the United States of America represent each other’s country, namely headlines (Mansfield 2006) and stance adverbials (Conrad and Biber 2000), in an attempt to identify the discursive resources enabling journalists to construct their professional “persona” while gazing at the ‘other’. The study is based on two synchronic comparable small corpora amounting to 150,021 words altogether. On the one hand, the so-called USpress, including 115 articles from both The Washington Post (WP) and The New York Times (NYT) about Italy; on the other hand, the Itpress, featuring 118 articles from Il Corriere della Sera (CS) and La Repubblica (Rep) about the Unites States. The two corpora cover a time span ranging from the previous six weeks – as of corpus design, i.e. October-November 2010 – to the previous year. Moreover, only title and running text of articles were collected for each text.On a methodological note, the study was characterized by two main stages. The first one lay in the manual study of headlines as the tool employed by journalists to set the scene for their narrative, with the aim of focusing on recurrent pragmatic features and the overall prevalence of either a denotative or a connotative component making the writer’s orientation explicit. In the second stage of the analysis, stance adverbials were investigated both quantitatively by means of computer-assisted tools, and qualitatively, with particular emphasis on their textual functions (e.g. hedging and boosting) as interpersonal attitude markers through which journalists negotiate the transmission of news they foreground as salient. For example, findings show that the key-distinction between denotative and connotative ones proved worth investigating, in that it shows how headlines may reveal much about authorial positioning in writing practices across newspapers. Denotative headlines are by far the most widely spread, because they represent 66.6 % of those in the WP, 64.8% of those of the CS, and 59.3% of the total headlines in Rep; on the contrary, connotative headlines are prominently attested in the NYT (59.3%).
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