Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News

From canonical headlines to online news texts

Author
ORCID logoJan Chovanec | Masaryk University
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027256584 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027269324 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
Google Play logo
This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres, it notes how conventional tenses, particularly in headlines, are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts, the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news, particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 253] 2014.  xvi, 294 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“Time is a crucial dimension of news, and the tense and aspect systems are the main site where journalists make their choices on how to express time. News discourse scholars are indebted to Chovanec for his close examination of these features, tracing shifts in practice between traditional print news and the online text.”
“Jan Chovanec’s Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News presents a highly original, authoritative analysis of the complexities of temporal expression in print and online news texts. The book’s innovative theoretical perspective, a synthesis of Bakhtinian dialogism and Bühlerian deictic theory, and its astute systemic-functional analysis of cross-segmental tense shifts in news texts, make it a thought-provoking contribution to research on temporality in news discourse. All future studies of temporal orientations in print and online institutional media discourse will have to take into account from Chovanec’s discussion of temporal discourse space and the textual rhetoric guiding strategies of temporal projection, reader positioning, interpersonalization, inter- and hypertextual reference, and access to external voices in news texts. The book can be recommended to anyone working in these areas.”
“In this detailed and painstaking study Chovanec provides a rich and thought-provoking account of the complexities of temporal deixis in print and online news texts. He covers a broad range of phenomena from the well-known use of the present tense in newspaper headlines to the little studied double tense shift across the main structural segments. This book will be essential reading for news discourse analysts and for pragmaticists interested in deictic phenomena alike.”
Cited by

Cited by 16 other publications

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2019. Direct Reader Address in Health-related Online News Articles: Imposing Problems and Projecting Desires for Action and Change onto Readers. Journalism Studies 20:16  pp. 2478 ff. DOI logo
Bubikova-Moan, Jarmila
2019. Reported parent-teacher dialogues on child language learning: voicing agency in interview narratives. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 22:6  pp. 768 ff. DOI logo
Chovanec, Jan
2015. Bednarek, Monika and Helen Caple. News Discourse. Brno Studies in English 41:1  pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
Chovanec, Jan
2017. Chapter 10. From adverts to letters to the editor. In Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 6],  pp. 175 ff. DOI logo
Chovanec, Jan
2019. Multimodal storytelling in the news: Sequenced images as ideological scripts of othering. Discourse, Context & Media 28  pp. 8 ff. DOI logo
Hadidi, Yaser, Ilham Taghiyev & Saadat Ahmadova
2021. Linguistic Devices Used in Newspaper Headlines. Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences :2  pp. 5 ff. DOI logo
Hadidi, Yaser, Ilham Taghiyev & Saadat Ahmadova
2022. Linguistic Devices Used in Newspaper Headlines. Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 25:2  pp. 5 ff. DOI logo
Ifantidou, Elly
2023. Newspaper headlines, relevance and emotive effects. Journal of Pragmatics 218  pp. 17 ff. DOI logo
Johannsen, Berit
2022.  She has a stadium named after her . Constructions and Frames 14:1  pp. 41 ff. DOI logo
Maj, Konrad, Stephan Lewandowsky & Jan De Houwer
2020. Is bad news on TV tickers good news? The effects of voiceover and visual elements in video on viewers’ assessment. PLOS ONE 15:4  pp. e0231313 ff. DOI logo
Mohammed Saleh Al-Hamzi, Ali, Sumarlam, Riyadi Santosa & Mujtaba Jamal
2023. A pragmatic and discourse study of common deixis used by Yemeni-Arab preachers in friday Islamic sermons at Yemeni mosques. Cogent Arts & Humanities 10:1 DOI logo
Molek-Kozakowska, Katarzyna
2014. Coercive metaphors in news headlines: a cognitive-pragmatic approach. Brno Studies in English 40:1  pp. 149 ff. DOI logo
Molek-Kozakowska, Katarzyna
2017. Stylistic analysis of headlines in science journalism: A case study ofNew Scientist. Public Understanding of Science 26:8  pp. 894 ff. DOI logo
Zeng, Weixin & Dechao Li
2023. Exploring an interdisciplinary interface between journalistic translation and journalism studies: insights from discursive news values analysis. Perspectives  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Zhang, Liying
2023. A corpus-based study of the discourse functions of English tense: the co-occurrence of tense and lexical aspect at various textual positions of news reports. Corpora 18:2  pp. 193 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Linguistics

Pragmatics

Main BIC Subject

CFG: Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2014028182 | Marc record