This book addresses the expression of evaluation and stance in war news. It is the first extended comparative study of ongoing television news coverage of a global event - the first month of the Iraqi war, 2003 - carried out using the combined tools of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. The cross-cultural data on which it is based comprise the evening news programmes of the British and Italian public broadcasting channels BBC One and RAI Uno, and the American and Italian commercial channels CBS and Canale 5. As the most common source of news for the majority of the population, television news is a key site for the transmission of cultural and political values, which can be studied effectively through a focus on the linguistic indicators of evaluation and stance. The cross-cultural nature of the corpus is exploited to examine from a linguistic point of view similarities and differences across three closely-connected ‘key’ Western cultures: the US, the UK and Italy. In addition to an introductory chapter which sets out the theoretical and analytical framework of the research, its methodological underpinnings, and contextual information regarding the war and the television broadcasters under study, the book includes chapters dealing with the following topics in a cross-cultural perspective: the news presenter as socio-cultural construct; a comparative analysis of the use of personal pronouns 'we' and 'you' by the news presenter; the representation of the conflict by embedded reporters and other war zone correspondents; the expression of evaluation and stance in the final segments of reporter and correspondent reports; the role of visual elements in war reporting; and techniques of patterns of attribution. Research results suggest that the strong links between the culture of the news providers and the news they produce, determine a cultural construction of the war revealing characteristic features which are both obviously and subtly retraceable to the individual cultures. Results also confirm the efficacy of combining the quantitative tools of corpus linguistics with the qualitative tools of discourse analysis in order to obtain greater insight into the expression of evaluation - an extremely complex linguistic phenomenon - in television news.
Evaluation and stance in War News: A linguistic analysis of American, British and Italian television news reporting of the 2003 Iraqi war.
HAARMAN, LOUANN;
2009
Abstract
This book addresses the expression of evaluation and stance in war news. It is the first extended comparative study of ongoing television news coverage of a global event - the first month of the Iraqi war, 2003 - carried out using the combined tools of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. The cross-cultural data on which it is based comprise the evening news programmes of the British and Italian public broadcasting channels BBC One and RAI Uno, and the American and Italian commercial channels CBS and Canale 5. As the most common source of news for the majority of the population, television news is a key site for the transmission of cultural and political values, which can be studied effectively through a focus on the linguistic indicators of evaluation and stance. The cross-cultural nature of the corpus is exploited to examine from a linguistic point of view similarities and differences across three closely-connected ‘key’ Western cultures: the US, the UK and Italy. In addition to an introductory chapter which sets out the theoretical and analytical framework of the research, its methodological underpinnings, and contextual information regarding the war and the television broadcasters under study, the book includes chapters dealing with the following topics in a cross-cultural perspective: the news presenter as socio-cultural construct; a comparative analysis of the use of personal pronouns 'we' and 'you' by the news presenter; the representation of the conflict by embedded reporters and other war zone correspondents; the expression of evaluation and stance in the final segments of reporter and correspondent reports; the role of visual elements in war reporting; and techniques of patterns of attribution. Research results suggest that the strong links between the culture of the news providers and the news they produce, determine a cultural construction of the war revealing characteristic features which are both obviously and subtly retraceable to the individual cultures. Results also confirm the efficacy of combining the quantitative tools of corpus linguistics with the qualitative tools of discourse analysis in order to obtain greater insight into the expression of evaluation - an extremely complex linguistic phenomenon - in television news.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
