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Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse
Edited by Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 5] 2015
► pp. 55–80

News in space and time

This paper deals with the question how early newspapers deal with the encoding of place and time information. The influence of genres relevant to early news, i.e. letters and chronicles, is taken into account as well as later developments within news writing. Deictic items frequent in early news show the potential influence of letter writing, while deixis in later times may depend on changes in publication rhythm. Time information shows a fairly high degree of imprecision, while place information is more precise but lacking in explanatory detail, similar to chronicle styles. For both time and place information, readers generally needed to be knowledgeable and work out references for themselves.
Keywords: chronicles, deixis, English news, letters, place adverbials, time adverbials
Published online: 24 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.5.03cla
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