The issues stated in the article line with the current interest to pragmatic value of news releases in modern media. The news is thought to be a verbalized focal reflection of some event that was chosen by media professionals for setting the current information agenda. Having generated the opinions on the newsworthiness the authors present a set of values that may be used for measurement of relevance and clarity of an event reflection in the news content with frequency, clarity, predictability, unexpectedness, amplitude, cultural proximity, elite nations, elite people, personification, negativity among them. The novelty of the research is that the newsworthiness is checked with the focus to lexical (thematic) representation of the news in a diachronic approach: the empirical base of the research was taken from the archives of UK national and local media sources (18-20 th cent.) and implied comparison of lexical means that reflected an event itself and some values of human interest potential in the news stories written in defined periods. The article states the trend for dynamics in the way the event is reflected in the news stories-the information core of the story is merged with detailed reporting parts, and their content is conditioned by social and moral values.
Abstract.The article presents an overview of opinions on Corpus linguistics, methodology of corpus researches is discussed in synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and the corpus statistical tools are discussed as a means to reveal the thematic organization of the text and build a cognitive-and-discursive model to describe a genre prototype for a group of texts. Corpus linguistics tools are applied to the compiled diachronic corpus of news texts about sports events at Olympiads in 1908 and 1948 (retrieved from "The British Newspaper Archive" with 46552 and 63093 words per sub-corpus). Categorization of the process for sports event was carried out with the support of AntConc that allowed to extract lists of words for each sub-corpus, reconstruct semantic means of process representation, identify the lock words that represent the sports event in the two sub-corpora. Having compared the key words from the 1948 sub-corpus with the 1908-referential-sub-corpus, the researchers hold cognitive-and-semantic analysis of verbs and highlighted semantic peculiarities in representation of sports events in every period; some dynamic changes were discovered, including a growing number of verbs that give a detailed description of the sports event (verbs of movement, acts and activity, physical and emotional states, modus verbs that pointed to low-efficiency of efforts and acts). The data prove efficiency of statistic tools in modeling the topic nuclei and distinguishing prototypical semantic content for a group of texts that belong to one genre but were written in different historical periods. Generalization of the data can open a route to a cognitive-and-discursive model of a genre and help in distinguishing historical and cultural peculiarities of its realization in discourse.
The article is devoted to scientific observation of historically-and socially-oriented discourse studies (historical discoursology) that are presented by means of various approaches and research traditions. The authors give a review of several well-established subfields in diachronic discourse studies of language units and text types, namely historical pragmatics, historical text linguistics, diachronic discourse analysis, with the focus on the tools and methodology employed to investigate historical changes in language-in-use practice. It is stated that in Russian linguistics the diachronic aspect of language units functioning has been studied so far within the framework of diachronic stylistics with the purpose to define via the analysis of language unit realizations semantic and functional potentials of language units and text constituents, to distinguish text composition with its dependency on social and cultural circumstances of text production, to discover synchronic / diachronic perspectives in general and specific discourse categories evolution. The authors make a suggestion that the use of corpus methods in the diachronic discourse studies might considerably enhance the perspectives of finding out some prototypical features of discourse and their historical variations, if a research is based on text collections (text data) that are being analyzed with the corpus analysis protocols, strictly set historical periods and general reference to a certain textual cultures. The clearly defined corpus data could certainly help in retrieving information on cognitive, social, cultural, pragmatic aspects of the discourse type represented in the text collection of a historical period under study. The further comparison of the data in particular historical periods and / or regional references opens the ways for discovering diachronic vectors in the discourse type development through stating changes, transformations, replacements in the discursive forms and genres.
The article is devoted to genre features of the military charter that used to be an exceptional type of an administrative document in the Cossack Don Host Province in the middle of the 18th cen. The notion of documentary text genre is considered as a set of cross-coordinated discursive and textual characteristics: communicative functions, communication interlocutors' relations, information specificity, text format, modality, spatial and temporal localization including. Having analyzed documents from the "Mikhailovsky Stanitsa Ataman" Archive Fund (1735 -1755, State Archive of Volgograd region, Russia), the authors revealed new data on formal and content related arrangement of the Cossack military charter as a documentary genre in the historical focus, stated its ethnical-and-cultural value.
Based on an integrative methodology that combines quantitative and qualitative methods of linguistic research, the authors consider grammatical forms, syntactic types and pragmatic functions of the tag question in British spoken discourse. The research material included samples of dialogues with tag questions taken from British contemporary fiction and the Spoken BNC2014. Drawing on the theory of linguistic metarepresentation and using corpus analysis tools the authors presented the model under study in structural-syntactic and functional-pragmatic perspectives and obtained reliable data on discourse realization of tag question models, specified their standard and common usage polarity status, distinguished bi- and monopolarity variations. An analysis of the tag question types that are distinguished as the combinations of the predicative and auxiliary parts shows that the most frequent type of tag question is the one formed with an affirmative predicative part and a negative tag. The corpus-based approach allowed obtaining quantitative data on frequencies of tag questions in British spoken discourse, retrieving the repertoire of tag questions with their grammatical representation. It is shown that in the corpus under study the most frequent form of the tag question is the form isn't it?. The least frequent forms of tag questions are the ones formed with the have verb, as well as the modal verbs will, may, can, which supports the thesis that tag questions are losing ground in British spoken discourse. Discourse-pragmatic analysis of utterance contexts with tag questions highlighted its discourse value in the British tradition of conversation, as they perform the following communicative functions: informational; etiquette; interpersonal-relation-corrective (focus-positive or focus-negative).
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