In:Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse
Edited by Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 5] 2015
► pp. 55–80
News in space and time
Published online: 24 July 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.5.03cla
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.5.03cla
This paper deals with the question how early newspapers deal with the encoding
of place and time information. The influence of genres relevant to early news,
i.e. letters and chronicles, is taken into account as well as later developments
within news writing. Deictic items frequent in early news show the potential
influence of letter writing, while deixis in later times may depend on changes in
publication rhythm. Time information shows a fairly high degree of imprecision,
while place information is more precise but lacking in explanatory detail,
similar to chronicle styles. For both time and place information, readers generally
needed to be knowledgeable and work out references for themselves.
Keywords: chronicles, deixis, English news, letters, place adverbials, time adverbials
References (24)
CEEC = Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Text version. 2006. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin, with additional annotation by Ann Taylor. Helsinki: University of Helsinki and York: University of York. Distributed through the Oxford Text Archive.
EEBO = Early English Books Online. [URL].
FLOB = Freiburg-Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen corpus. 1991 clone of LOB. Compiled by Christian Mair et al. In ICAME Collection of English Language Corpora (CD-ROM), 2nd ed. ed. by Knut Hofland, Anne Lindebjerg & Jørn Thunestvedt. Bergen: The HIT Centre, University of Bergen.
RNC = Rostock Newspaper Corpus. 2000. Compiled by Kristina Schneider & Friedrich Ungerer. Not published.
ZEN = Zurich English Newspaper Corpus. Version 1.0. 2004. Compiled by Udo Fries, Hans Martin Lehmann et al. Zurich: University of Zurich. [URL].
Primary sources
Secondary sources
. 2001. Dimensions of variation among 18th-century registers. In Hans-Jürgen Diller & Manfred Görlach (eds.), Towards a history of English as a history of genres, 89–109. Heidelberg: Winter.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.
Collins, A.R. [no date]. Historical calendar. In Miscellany: Miscellaneous technical articles by Dr A R Collins. [URL]. (27 April, 2013).
Fries, Udo & Peter Schneider. 2000. ZEN: Preparing the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus. In Friedrich Ungerer (ed.), English media texts – past and present: Language and textual structure, 1–24. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Fries, Udo. 2012. Newspapers from 1665 to 1765. In Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös & Udo Fries, News as changing texts: Corpora, methodologies and analysis, 49–89. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Fritz, Gerd. 2001. Text types in a new medium: The first newspapers (1609). Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2. 69–83.
Galtung, Johan & Mari Ruge. 1973. Structuring and selecting news. In Stanley Cohen & Jock Young (eds.), The manufacture of news: Deviance, social problems and the mass media, 52–63. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Haß-Zumkehr, Ulrike. 1998. “Wie glaubwürdige Nachrichten versichert haben”: Formulierungs-
traditionen in Zeitungsnachrichten des 17. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Narr.
Hundt, Marianne, Andrea Sand & Rainer Siemund. 1998. Manual of information to accompany The Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB). Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg: Englisches Seminar.
Koch, Peter & Wulf Oesterreicher. 1985. Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36. 15–43.
McIntosh, Carey. 1998. The evolution of English prose, 1700–1800: Style, politeness, and print culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raymond, Joad. 1996. The invention of the newspaper: English newsbooks, 1641–1649. Oxford: Clarendon.
Schneider, Kristina. 2002. The development of popular journalism in England from 1700 to the present: Corpus compilation and selective stylistic analysis. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Rostock.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
