Cover not available

In:Corpus-based Approaches to Register Variation
Edited by Elena Seoane and Douglas Biber
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 103] 2021
► pp. 313–338

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 12
Exploring sub-register variation in Victorian newspapers

Evidence from the British Library Newspapers database

 | University of Helsinki
Published online: 8 December 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.103.12hil
Abstract
This chapter explores sub-register variation in newspaper writing in the 19th century using two corpora extracted from the British Library Newspapers database, the most comprehensive collection of national and regional newspapers from the Victorian period. As an ‘agile’ (Hundt & Mair 1999) register, newspaper writing is well suited for tracing language change and investigating the interrelationship between language and culture. Frequency analysis of select linguistic features identifies systematic patterns of variation, which can be linked to the communicative functions of sub-registers. The chapter also critically reflects on the value of the database for corpus-based register analysis, especially on how the findings and interpretations are contingent on what sampling criteria are used and how the notion of (sub-)register is operationalized.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Register analysis using BL Newspapers
  • 3.Material and method
    • 3.1Extracting a sample
    • 3.2Method of analysis
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (36)
References
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation Across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Conrad, Susan. 2019. Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Davies, Mark, Jones, James K. & Tracy-Ventura, Nicole. 2006. Spoken and written register variation in Spanish: A multi-dimensional analysis. Corpora 1(1): 1–37. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Gray, Bethany. 2013. Being specific about historical change: The influence of sub-register. Journal of English Linguistics 41(2): 104–34. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Burnard, Lou (ed.). 2007. Reference Guide for the British National Corpus (XML Edition). <[URL]> (27 May 2021).
Claridge, Claudia. 2009. As silly as an Irish teague. Comparisons in Early English news discourse. In Early Modern English News Discourse: Newspapers, Pamphlets and Scientific News Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 187], Andreas H. Jucker (ed), 91–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. News discourse. In Historical Pragmatics, Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsainen (eds), 587–620. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Conboy, Martin. 2010. The Language of Newspapers: Socio-Historical Perspectives. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2007. TIME Magazine Corpus. <[URL]> (27 May 2021).
. 2019. Corpus-based studies of lexical and semantic variation: The importance of both corpus size and corpus design. In From Data to Evidence in English Language Research, Terttu Nevalainen, Carla Suhr & Irma Taavitsainen (eds), 66–87. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Denzin, Norman K. 2015. Triangulation. In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, George Ritzer (ed.). London: Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Duguid, Alison. 2010. Newspaper discourse informalisation: A diachronic comparison from keywords. Corpora 5(2): 109–38. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Francis, Winthrop N. & Kučera, Henry. 1964. Manual of Information to Accompany a Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English, for Use with Digital Computers. Revised 1971. Revised and amplified 1979. Providence RI: Department of Linguistics, Brown University. <[URL]> (27 May 2021).
Fries, Udo. 2012. English and the media: Newspapers. In English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, Alexander Bergs & Laurel Brinton (eds), 1063–75. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fries, Udo & Schneider, Peter. 2000. ZEN: Preparing the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus. In English Media Texts – Past and Present: Language and Textual Structure [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 80], Friedrich Ungerer (ed.), 3–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garside, Roger & Smith, Nick. 1997. A hybrid grammatical tagger: CLAWS4. In Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora, Roger Garside, Geoffrey Leech & Anthony McEnery (eds), 102–21. London: Longman. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gregory, Ian Norman, Atkinson, Paul David, Hardie, Andrew, Joulain-Jay, Amelia T., Kershaw, Daniel, Porter, Catherine, Rayson, Paul Edward & Rupp, Christopher John. 2016. From digital resources to historical scholarship with the British Library 19th Century Newspaper Collection. Journal of Siberian Federal University: Humanities and Social Sciences 9(4): 994–1006. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gregory, Ian N. & Paterson, Laura L. 2020. English language and history. Geographical representations of poverty in historical newspapers. In The Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities, Svenja Adolphs & Dawn Knight (eds), 418–338. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2007. From web page to mega-corpus: The CNN transcripts. In Corpus Linguistics and the Web, Marianne Hundt, Nadja Nesselhauf & Caroline Biewer (eds), 69–85. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Mair, Christian. 1999. “Agile” and “uptight” genres: The corpus-based approach to language change in progress. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4(2): 221–42. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey & Helen Goodluck. 1978. Manual of Information to Accompany the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English, for Use with Digital Computers. Oslo: Department of English, University of Oslo. <[URL]> (27 May 2021).
Jucker, Andreas H. 1992. Social Stylistics. Syntactic Variation in British Newspapers. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2009. Newspapers, pamphlets and scientific news discourse in Early Modern Britain. In Early Modern English News Discourse: Newspapers, Pamphlets and Scientific News Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 187], Andreas H. Jucker (ed), 1–9. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kelleher, Christa & Wagener, Thorsten. 2011. Ten guidelines for effective data visualization in scientific publications. Environmental Modelling & Software 26(6): 822–27. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ljung, Magnus. 2000. Newspaper genres and newspaper English. In English Media Texts, Past and Present: Language and Textual Structure [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 80], Friedrich Ungerer (ed.), 131–150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McEnery, Tony & Hardie, Andrew. 2011. Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2002. English newsletters in the 17th century. In Text Types and Corpora. Studies in Honour of Udo Fries, Andreas Fischer, Gunnel Tottie & Hans Martin Lehmann (eds), 67–76. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nicholson, Bob. 2012. Counting culture; or, how to read Victorian newspapers from a distance. Journal of Victorian Culture 17(2): 238–46. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Palander-Collin, Minna & Nevala, Minna. 2020. Person reference and democratization in British English. In New Perspectives on Democratization, Turo Hiltunen & Lucía Loureiro-Porto (eds). Special Issue in Language Sciences 79. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Percy, Carol. 2012. Early advertising and newspapers as sources of sociolinguistic investigation. In The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, Juan Manuel Conde Silvestre & Juan Camilo Hernández Campoy (eds), 191–210. Malden MA: John Wiley & Sons. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph & Hilpert, Martin. 2017. Colloquialization in journalistic writing: The case of inserts with a focus on well. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18(1): 104–35. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ungerer, Friedrich. 2002. When news stories are no longer just stories: The emergence of the top-down structure in news reports in English newspapers. In Text Types and Corpora. Studies in Honour of Udo Fries, Andreas Fischer, Gunnel Tottie & Hans Martin Lehmann (eds), 105–22. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Williamson, Kevin. 2009. Read All About It! A History of the British Newspaper. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Ali, Dilawar, Kenzo Milleville, Steven Verstockt, Nico Van de Weghe, Sally Chambers & Julie M. Birkholz
2024. Computer vision and machine learning approaches for metadata enrichment to improve searchability of historical newspaper collections. Journal of Documentation 80:5 ► pp. 1031 ff. DOI logo
Bös, Birte
2024. Women’s voices in the public sphere. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:2 ► pp. 302 ff. DOI logo
Hiltunen, Turo
2024. Early newspapers as data for corpus linguistics (and Digital Humanities). In Challenges in corpus linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 118], ► pp. 68 ff. DOI logo
Hiltunen, Turo & Turo Vartiainen
2024. A corpus-pragmatic analysis of linguistic democratisation in the British Hansard. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:2 ► pp. 245 ff. DOI logo
Hiltunen, Turo, Turo Vartiainen & Jenni Räikkönen
2024. Democratisation. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:2 ► pp. 177 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 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.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue