Multimodal News Analysis across Cultures

Abstract

Corpus-based discourse analysts are becoming increasingly interested in the incorporation of non-linguistic data, for example through corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis. This Element applies this new approach in relation to how news values are discursively constructed through language and photographs. Using case studies of news from China and Australia, the Element presents a cross-linguistic comparison of news values in national day reporting. Discursive news values analysis (DNVA) has so far been mainly applied to English-language data. This Element offers a new investigation of Chinese DNVA and provides momentum to scholars around the world who are already adopting DNVA to their local contexts. With its focus on national days across two very different cultures, the Element also contributes to research on national identity and cross-linguistic corpus linguistics.

Audience engagement with news on Chinese social media: A discourse analysis of the People’s Daily official account on WeChat

“…Therefore, the use of DNVA can shed light on the role that linguistic resources play in communicating news values. Further, based on the analysis of Chinese news reports (Caple et al, 2020), this framework proved to be feasible for analysing Chinese data. This study is hoped to manifest culture-specific features in the Chinese media context where the press and government are closely related.…”

Libya, the media and the language of violence: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis

“…With an event's value, we refer to the sociocultural side. In other words, we are interested in analysing how news values are constructed through language to establish the newsworthiness of the reported events (see further Bednarek and Caple 2012a, 2012b, 2014and Caple et al 2020.…”

“…However, this approach of linguistic analysis applied only to English-language news, and it has just recently started to be applied to other languages such as Chinese (Caple et al 2020), Spanish (Fuster-Márquez and Gregori-Signes 2019) and Persian/Farsi (Makki 2019). Yet, it has not been developed for the Arabic language.…”

“…Yet, it has not been developed for the Arabic language. In this study, we will follow the strategy of Caple et al (2020), who took ten relevant news values to the Chinese context (rather than the linguistic resources) as a departure point and inductively established whether they were constructed in the Chinese data. In our case, we selected six news values that are relevant to the Arabic news context and we later applied them to the English data: ELITENESS, IMPACT, NEGATIVITY, POSITIVITY, SUPERLATIVENESS and PERSONALISATION.…”

The year’s work in stylistics 2020

“…Another indication of the enduring interest in media discourse is how linguists have continuously engaged with the developing formats of the news. In Multimodal News Analysis across Cultures (Caple et al, 2020), corpus-based discourse analysts examine the construction of news values in language and images. Presenting as case studies the reporting of national days in Australia and China respectively, this text extends corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis to consider photography alongside text and to move analysis beyond exclusively English language data.…”