Does Internet initiate new genres? the case of printed newspapers, their online versions and citizen press
Résumé
The birth and spread of the Internet has initiated new forms of mass media, such as online newspapers, e-zines, participatory media and citizen press. With the purpose of outlining whether the emerged media can be designed as new genres, this research explores the linguistic dimensions that are affected by putting the news online. Our study combines a twofold approach of discourse analysis, comparing specific aspects of traditional newspapers and online news media. On the one hand, a quantitative analysis based on automatic tagging measures variation concerning the global discourse organisation e.g. visual organisation, high-level textual patterns, lexical recurrence, etc. (cf. Ho-Dac 2010). On the other hand, a computer-assisted qualitative analysis measures in expressing authorial stance or evaluation (cf. Hunston and Thompson, 2000; Bednarek, 2006) (e.g. speaker-deictic elements, verba dicendi et sentiendi, modal expressions, etc.). Our method of investigation is based on corpus analysis. We analyze a large-scale corpus (10.000.000 words) composed of datasets representing different steps on a graduate scale from traditional printed newspaper to online citizen press. References: Bednarek, M. (2006) 'Evaluation in media discourse: Analysis of a newspaper corpus', Continuum, London. Hunston, S. and Thompson, G. (eds.) (2000) 'Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse', Oxford University Press, Oxford. Ho-Dac, L.-M. (2010) 'An exploratory data-driven analysis for describing discourse organization', in Almela, Moisés & Sánchez, Aquilino (Eds.). A Mosaic of Corpus Linguistics. Selected Approaches. Frankfurt/Berlin: Peter Lang, pp 79-100