News as changing texts: corpora, methodologies and analysis

This book focuses on the dialectic interrelation between ‘news’ and ‘change’, whereby 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 such typological variety explored across the centuries, largely in the British environment. The time spans in the chapters have been distributed according to (a) historical key moments in the process of news-writing changes, and (b) extant computerized corpora covering such periods, thereby permitting specific linguistic analyses. Indeed, each chapter makes use of a set of corpora specifically devised to suit the needs of scholars studying the periods under scrutiny. The topics discussed and the corpora exploited to analyze them call into question basic methodological issues that are tackled from different perspectives in the book, while the epicentre of all research remains the news itself, in a continuous process of adjustment and renewal.