Comparing discourse construction in 17th-century news genres
A case study of murder reports
In this paper I shall examine aspects of discourse construction in 17th-century
crime reports. To this purpose I shall select four news genres which circulated
in the 17th-century news market, reaching a heterogeneous cross-section of
society: news broadside ballads, occasional news pamphlets, newsbooks, and
The London Gazette as an example of an early newspaper. The news genres will
be compared in terms of structure and lexis so as to highlight similarities and
differences in their murder presentation and reporting. By referring to van
Dijk’s (1988) categories of news discourse, I shall focus on the layout, the lead
(which will be called “proto-lead”) and the body of the news. In particular, the
proto-lead and the body of the news will be inspected for authorial comments,
factuality and metadiscourse, their distribution and realisation being indicative
of the news values and ideology behind the news report. Frequent instances of
discourse interrelatedness among the news genres testify to a certain degree of
continuity in terms of authorial intrusion, blending of factuality and sensationalism,
and Puritan stance. At the same time, however, forms of discourse
variation – especially from the second half of the century – highlight changes
in the direction of objectivity, impersonalisation and brevity. The analysis will
show how authorial commentaries and metadiscourse progressively withdraw
from the murder account with a consequential foregrounding of factuality as
the major ingredient of a high-quality report.
References
Corpora, archives and tools
EBBA = English Broadside Ballad Archive
University of California at Santa Barbara.
[URL].
EEBO = Early English Books Online
LNC = Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus
Compiled by
Tony McEnery &
Andrew Hardie.
[URL].
The London Gazette Archive
The Official King James Bible Online
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