Evaluation Across Newspaper Genres (Routledge Studies in Applied Linguistics)

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.

Jonathan Ngai is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University.