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Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös & Udo Fries. News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis

In spite of the great linguistic interest in the evolution of news language in recent years, which has produced at least three relevant historical corpora and a series of conferences (CHINED I–III), there has so far not been a monographlength survey treatment of the linguistic development of this register. The volume under discussion represents a substantial step in this direction. The aim of the book is to discuss the change of news discourse with regard to form, content and structure, and to pay close attention to the challenges posed by available corpora, various methodologies and analyses (1). What is surprising is that no definition of news (discourse) is provided at the outset. The CHINED conference proceedings (Brownlees 2006, Jucker 2009)1, for example, are based on a fairly wide understanding of the concept, including for example also contributions on scientific ‘news reports’ or classified advertising – an approach which is apparently not shared by the authors of the present volume, but this has to be gleaned from various passages in the book (e.g. ch. 4, section 5). A more explicit stance might have been helpful. Apart from the introduction and the conclusion (written by Facchinetti and Brownlees respectively), the book is subdivided into four chapters dealing with different periods, for each of which one of the four authors is responsible: 1620–1665 (Brownlees), 1665–1765 (Fries), 1760–1960 (Bös) and 1960s–present (Facchinetti). Thus, the structure is at least partly based on the specific expertise of the authors, three of whom are compilers of the corpora that play a prominent part in the relevant sections of the book. From the point of view of the (external) history of the press, different subdivisions would have been possible, e.g. the various technological, economic and news business developments in the 19th century as dividing lines (telegraph, transatlantic cable, Penny Press, news agencies). Chapters 1–4 each start with historical overviews of the development of the press in the period covered by the respective chapter. These are very informative and together give good and nevertheless brief surveys in a way that is useful for the linguistic researcher. Brownlees (ch. 1, section 1) shows how already in the first forty-five years (1620–1665) there is considerable development from rather