Louann Haarman

Linda Lombardo

In a world in which advanced communication technologies have made the reporting of disasters and conflicts (also in the form of breaking news) a familiar and 'normalised' activity, the information we present here about television news reporting of the 2003 war in Iraq has implications that go beyond this particular conflict. Evaluation and Stance in War News functions as a tool kit for the critical evaluation of language in the news, both as raw data in need of interpretation and as carefully packaged products of 'information management' in need of 'unpacking'. The chapters offer an array of theoretical and empirical instruments for revealing, identifying, sifting, weighing and connecting patterns of language use that construct messages. These messages carry with them world views and value systems that can either create an ever wider divide or serve to build bridges between peoples and countries.

A Linguistic Analysis of American, British and Italian television news reporting of the 2003 Iraqi war

Evaluation and Stance in War News

Alan Partington

John Morley

Corpus linguistics has made impressive strides in the fields of lexicography and grammatical description, but has had relatively little to say as yet in describing features of discourse. This volume, then, examines how it is possible to use concordance technology and the detailed linguistic evidence available in corpora to enhance the study of, among other things, how speakers/writers organise their discourse, how they express evaluation of their topics and the rhetorical strategies they employ to persuade an audience. Particular attention is paid to interrogating specialized corpora and to devising techniques to discover what is going on between speakers and between authors and readers in particular varieties of the language. These studies reveal the value of integrating corpus techniques with other, non-automatic, methods of research into the linguistic record and of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. In general, they show how it is possible to use corpora to analyse discourse not only as product but also as process.

Louann Haarman

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