Language in the Spotlight: News Manufacturing and Discourse

The aim of this volume is to conduct an analysis of news discourse in a selection of news reports following the studies on textual organisation (Labov e Waletzky 1967) and interrelations between the thematic organisation of text and associated language (van Dijk 1988). The volume consists of two main parts. In the first part, a number of issues around the notions of language, discourse and text have been examined in relation to news reports since different levels of analysis seem to emerge to make sense of the overall meaning and goal of a text/discourse, including the semantics of word-formation (Lieber 2004), discourse construction (Sunderland 2004). The volume covers a number of issues within the interdisciplinary field of linguistics which have provided materials to the investigation of the role and behaviour of language in news discourse, specifically in components of news stories. In the second part, aspects of the ‘grammar’ of headlines and leads in a selection of British daily newspapers have been examined taking into account the socio-economic profile of the target readership of each newspaper (Jucker 1992; Bell 1993). Interrelations between news making and the use of language in the construction of consensus and aspects of interdiscursivity (Bhatia 1993, 2004; Fairclough 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2001) have been explored along with interrelations between elements in the surface and deep text in news stories from up-, mid- and down market newspapers with reference to the organisation of rhetorical devices in the ‘manufacturing’ of consensus meant to support Tony Blair’s ambitious socio-political-economic enterprise following Labour’s landslide victory in 1997.