Semantic Styles in Newspaper Journalism: A Systemic Functional Study

This monograph uses Bernstein and Hasan’s concepts of coding orientations and semantic styles to elucidate differences in language in various British newspapers. Silvia Samiolo examines whether the lexico-grammatical and semantic differences between various British newspapers can be connected to Berstein and Hasan’s concepts of coding orientations and semantic styles, as well as in terms of Bell’s concept of audience design. She uses a purpose-built corpus of over 80 articles on the same topic, published on two consecutive days and taken from ten prominent British daily newspapers. Divided into sub-corpora according to genre, in particular news report and editorial comment, attention is given to the kind of newspaper the article was taken from – designated ‘quality’ or ‘popular’. Samiolo tags the corpus using Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (SFL) tagging systems, and the frequencies of over 300 tages are counted using the Wordsmith Tools program. The data obtained lies at the heart of the discussion of the main differences between articles from a range of daily newspapers. This monograph will appeal to researchers in systemic functional linguistics and as well as those in semantics, discourse analysis and media studies.

Table of Contents

List of Tables; List of Figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The basis of the study; 2. The corpus; 3. Analysis of the corpus: aims and methods; 4. Discussion and interpretation of the results; 5. Conclusions; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

Author Biography

Silvia Samiolo has a PhD in Anglo-Germanic Linguistics, Philology and Literatures from the University of Padua, Italy