The Language of Newspapers

From the ideological bias of the press, to the role of headlines in newspaper articles and ways in which newspapers relate to their audience, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of newspaper language.

Unit one: Introduction; What is a newspaper? ; What is news? ; Do newspapers contain news? ; Who owns the press? ; Who pays for newspapers? ; Should newspapers be impartial? ; Unit two: Headlines; What is a headline? ; What are headlines for? ; The language of headlines; Putting words in: what the headline writer includes; Taking words out: what the headline writer omits; Shaking it all about: how the headline writer reorganises language ; Graphological features of headlines; Headlines as information; Headlines as opinion manipulators; Unit three: Audience; Who reads the papers? How newspapers identify their audience; The identity of the reader; The role of the audience; Editorialising; Unit four: Representation of groups: words, words, words; Linguistic determinism; What's in a name? ; Naming of groups; Representations of women; Ethnic group; Unit five: Making Monsters: syntax; Making monsters: Mary Bell, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson; Deleting the actor; Mary Bell; Facts and possibilities; Deleting the action; Modality; Unit six: Discourse; The barbarian at the gates: Britain under siege; Identifying patterns in text; Lexical cohesion; Grammatical cohesion; Pragmatics: language in context; Presupposition; Implicature.