Evaluation Across Newspaper Genres: Hard News Stories, Editorials and Feature Articles

Evaluation Across Newspaper Genres: Hard News Stories, Editorials and Feature Articles is the first book-length study of evaluation or stance in three major newspaper genres: hard news stories, editorials and feature articles, the last of which is a Cinderella genre in linguistic studies. It offers a fresh approach to exploring the ways in which evaluation or stance contributes to the construction of the three newspaper genres, each with a distinct communicative purpose.

Key features include

• using a 900,000-word comparable corpus of newspaper texts arranged by genre and topic domain
• drawing on a specially developed framework of analysis with a strong orientation to news values
• carrying out structural analysis by creating sub-corpora of different parts of newspaper texts and
• adopting a functional approach to evaluation in newspaper discourse

Evaluation Across Newspaper Genres amply demonstrates that evaluation plays a vital and yet dynamic role in the construction of hard news stories, editorials and feature articles by performing a great variety of discourse functions. In doing so, the book also illuminates such important linguistic concepts as specificity/variation and textual colligation. Providing a new and unifying perspective on evaluation as a prime driver of text construction, it will be of interest and use to researchers, teachers and students of English language, applied linguistics and journalism.