Positioning readers in newspaper discourse: A contrastive case study

  1. Izaskun Elorza 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Salamanca
    info

    Universidad de Salamanca

    Salamanca, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02f40zc51

Revista:
Birkbeck Studies in Applied Linguistics (BISAL)

ISSN: 1754-5366

Año de publicación: 2009

Volumen: 4

Páginas: 1-22

Tipo: Artículo

GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Otras publicaciones en: Birkbeck Studies in Applied Linguistics (BISAL)

Resumen

A corpus-based analysis was carried out with the aim of revealing dissimilaritiesin newspaper discourse in Spanish and English which can both reflect and bedue to differences in the use of cultural patterns. For this purpose, two smallcorpora consisting of the news articles covering an event of global importancewere compiled. This event was the world food summit organized by the UN’sFood and Agriculture Organization and the corpora cover all the texts whichwere published on the opening day of the summit (3 June 2008). One corpusconsists of all the articles appearing in the electronic version of El Paísnewspaper and the other contains all the articles from the electronic version ofthe Guardian.In order to compare the two corpora, a qualitative-quantitative analysisadapted from O’Halloran (2007, 2009) was carried out using corpus linguisticsmethodology and discourse analysis. The analysis reveals that newsworthiness(Bell, 1991) is higher in El País than in the Guardian and that each newspaperaligns itself crucially with different participants. These results show how eachnewspaper has constructed its own agenda of the summit so that each readershipis offered a different account and, therefore, is positioned in a different way ineach case.

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