Local textual functions of move in newspaper story patterns

The article investigates the link between lexical and textual patterns in newspaper texts. Patterns in newspaper stories strikingly illustrate the relationship between meaning and form. The article presents an analysis of the core move follow* in a corpus of Guardian newspaper texts. The analysis looks at the distribution of move follow* across different sections of the newspaper, it describes the meanings that follow the move pattern, and it investigates the textual positions of the pattern in the newspaper articles. It is shown that the move pattern has a tendency to occur at the beginning of a paragraph and has a preference for the second paragraph in an article. The textual positions of the pattern are linked to the news values that characterise a story. By drawing on the concept of local textual functions and White’s (1997) approach to the structure of newspaper articles, the analysis illustrates how corpus linguistic and textlinguistic approaches can complement one another.