A phraseological comparison of international news agency reports published online: Lexical bundles in the English-language output of ANSA, Adnkronos, Reuters and UPI

This paper presents a study of the lexical bundles (LBs) used in the English-language reports published online by four international news agencies: ANSA and Adnkronos (both based in Italy), Reuters and United Press International (UPI) – headquartered in the UK and the USA, respectively. Given that they provide insights into the phraseological make-up of news texts, LBs are considered revealing indicators of the complex strategies at work in the news-making process: the LBs found in the ANSA and Adnkronos online news reports (which result from an elaborate process of linguistic mediation combining translation, non-native writing, cross-linguistic summarisation, editing and adaptation) are compared with those used by Reuters and UPI (representing the native/original benchmark), in search for commonalities as well as divergences, and peculiar usage patterns displayed by individual news agencies. Only one 4-word LB occurs in all four sources (“the end of the”), and the analysis looks more closely at those that are over- and under-represented across the corpora, considering their discursive functions to account for the observed discrepancies. The results bring to the fore the distinctive phraseological features of the mediated reports published in English by the two Italian news agencies: three LBs (“the head of the”, “as well as the” and “is one of the”) are present both in the ANSA and Adnkronos data, but they do not feature in the Reuters and UPI corpora; conversely, no LB used in both native/original corpora is simultaneously absent from the ANSA and Adnkronos data. In addition, the overall usage of 4-word LBs is much higher in the ANSA and Adnkronos corpora compared to the Reuters and UPI data, suggesting that the mediated news texts are much more formulaic than their native/original counterparts. Another interesting finding of this study is that ANSA and Adnkronos taken individually have the highest number of LBs that are not attested in the data of any of the other three news agencies, which points to a more idiosyncratic use of phraseology in the mediated news reports.