16. It’s always the same old news!

The present diachronic study compares two large contemporary corpora of British quality newspapers with the aim of investigating the increased popularisation of newspaper register. The study focuses on those examples which are highlighted by a quantitative comparative overview of the two corpora based on a series of analyses using keyword and concordancing tools. Results show that a shift in presentation and style is indeed present, with an increased ‘familiarisation’ of language, in particular the use of spoken forms. Given the high keyness of these words, and their preference for direct speech, it was expected that this increase would be reflected in a similar increase in frequency of quotes. However, this was not found.