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Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News
From canonical headlines to online news texts
This book provides the first comprehensive account of temporal deixis in English printed and online news texts. Linking the characteristic usage of tenses with the projection of deictic centres, it notes how conventional tenses, particularly in headlines, are affected by heteroglossia arising from various accessed voices. The resulting tense shifts are interpreted pragmatically as a conventional reader-oriented strategy that creates the impression of temporal co-presence. It is argued that since different tense choices systematically correlate with the three main textual segments of news texts, the function of tense needs to be viewed in a close connection with its local context. Traditional news texts are also contrasted with online news, particularly as far as the effect of hypertextuality on the coding of time is concerned. A two-level structural framework for the analysis of online news is proposed in order to account for their increased textual complexity. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working in the fields of media pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 253] 2014. xvi, 294 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 27 October 2014
Published online on 27 October 2014
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Preface | pp. ix–9
- Acknowledgements | pp. xi–xii
- List of abbreviations | pp. xiii–13
- List of tables and figures | pp. xv–xvi
- Introduction | pp. 1–11
- Part I. Temporal deixis in print and online news
- Theoretical foundations | pp. 15–24
- Temporal deixis and news discourse | pp. 25–58
- Temporal deixis in online newspapers | pp. 59–93
- Part II. Textual rhetoric of headlines
- Temporal deixis in headlines | pp. 97–122
- The present tense in headlines | pp. 123–144
- Other tenses in headlines | pp. 145–178
- Auxiliaries in headlines: Ellipsis and (non)-finiteness | pp. 179–202
- Part III. Textual rhetoric of news texts
- The textuality of news texts | pp. 205–245
- Temporal structure of news reports | pp. 247–268
- Conclusion | pp. 269–276
- References
- Index | pp. 285–294
“Time is a crucial dimension of news, and the tense and aspect systems are the main site where journalists make their choices on how to express time. News discourse scholars are indebted to Chovanec for his close examination of these features, tracing shifts in practice between traditional print news and the online text.”
Allan Bell, Auckland University of Technology
“Jan Chovanec’s Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News presents a highly original, authoritative analysis of the complexities of temporal expression in print and online news texts. The book’s innovative theoretical perspective, a synthesis of Bakhtinian dialogism and Bühlerian deictic theory, and its astute systemic-functional analysis of cross-segmental tense shifts in news texts, make it a thought-provoking contribution to research on temporality in news discourse. All future studies of temporal orientations in print and online institutional media discourse will have to take into account from Chovanec’s discussion of temporal discourse space and the textual rhetoric guiding strategies of temporal projection, reader positioning, interpersonalization, inter- and hypertextual reference, and access to external voices in news texts. The book can be recommended to anyone working in these areas.”
Richard W. Janney, University of Munich
“In this detailed and painstaking study Chovanec provides a rich and thought-provoking account of the complexities of temporal deixis in print and online news texts. He covers a broad range of phenomena from the well-known use of the present tense in newspaper headlines to the little studied double tense shift across the main structural segments. This book will be essential reading for news discourse analysts and for pragmaticists interested in deictic phenomena alike.”
Andreas H. Jucker, University of Zurich
Cited by (21)
Cited by 21 other publications
Fetzer, Anita
2026. Quotation headlines in the printed British quality press. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 36:1 ► pp. 63 ff.
Thienthong, Atikhom
2026. Contextualizing verb forms and determining their association in reporting and reported clauses. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 49:1 ► pp. 112 ff.
Bondar, Vladimir
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Molotovskaya, O. V., M. Zhambylkyzy & M. Aleixo
Mohammed Saleh Al-Hamzi, Ali, Sumarlam, Riyadi Santosa & Mujtaba Jamal
Zhang, Liying
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Hadidi, Yaser, Ilham Taghiyev & Saadat Ahmadova
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Andersen, Elisabeth Muth, Anette Grønning, Maiju Hietaketo & Marjut Johansson
Bubikova-Moan, Jarmila
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Chovanec, Jan
Chovanec, Jan
2017. From adverts to letters to the editor. In Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 6], ► pp. 175 ff.
Chovanec, Jan
Molek-Kozakowska, Katarzyna
Molek-Kozakowska, Katarzyna
[no author supplied]
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