Newspaper Style. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.

N e w s paper style was the last of all the styles of written literary English to be recognized as a specific form of writing standing apart from other forms.

English newspaper writing dates from the 17th century. The first newspapers carried only news, without comments, as commenting was considered to be against the principles of journalism. By the 19th century, newspaper language was recognized as a particular variety of style, characterized by a specific communicative purpose and its own system of language means.

The specific conditions of..newspaper publication, the restrictions of time and space,^have left яп .indelible mark on newspaper English. For more than a century writers arid linguists have been vigorously, attacking "the slipshod construction and the vulgar vocabulary" of news­paper English. The very term newspaper English carried a shade of disparagement. Yet, for all the defects of newspaper English, serious though they may be, this forrq of the English literary language cannot be reduced — as some .purists have claimed — merely to careless slovenly writing or to a distorted literary English. This is one of the forms of the English literary language characterized— as any other style — by a definite communicative ainrand its own system of language means. . •

Not all the printed matter found in newspapers comes under newspa­per style. The modern newspaper carries material of an extremely di­verse character. On the pages of a newspaper one finds not only news and comment on it, press reports and articles, advertisements and announce­ments, but also stories and poems, crossword puzzles, chess problems and the like. Since the latter serve the purpose of entertaining the reader, they cannot be considered specimens of newspaper style. It is newspaper

printed matter that performs the function of informing the reader and providing him with an evaluation of the information published that can be regarded as belonging to newspaper style.

Thus, English newspaper style may be defined as a system of inter­related lexical, phraseological and grammatical means which is per­ceived by the community as a separate linguistic unity that serves the purpose of informing and instructing the reader.

Information and evaluation co-exist in the modern English news­paper, and it is only in teftns of diachrony that the function of informa­tion can claim priority. In fact, all kinds of newspaper writing are to a greater or lesser degree both informative and evaluative. But, of course, it is obvious that in most of the basic newspaper "genres" one of the two functions prevails; thus, for example, news of all kinds is essentially informative, whereas the editorial is basically evaluative.

Informatio.i in the English newspaper is conveyed, in the first place, through the-medium of:

1) brief'news items,

2) press reports (parliamentary, of court proceedings, etc.),

3) articles purely informational in character,

4) advertisements and announcements.

The newspaper also seeks to influence public opinion on political and other "matters. Elements of appraisal may be observed in the very selection and way of presentation of news, in the use of specific vocabula­ry, such as allege and claim, casting some doubt on the facts reported, and syntactic constructions indicating a lack of assurance on the part of the reporter as to the correctness of the facts reported or his desire to avoid responsibility (for example, 'Mr. X was said to have opposed the proposal'; 'Mr. X was quoted as saying...'}. The headlines of news items, apart from giving information about the subject-matter, also carry a con­siderable amount of appraisal (the size and arrangement of the headline, the use of emotionally coloured words and elements of emotive syntax), thus indicating the interpretation of the facts in the news item that fol­lows. But, of course, the principal vehicle of interpretation and apprai­sal is the newspaper article, and the editorial in particular. Editorials (leading articles or leaders) are characterized by a subjective handling of facts, political or otherwise. They have much in common with classi­cal specimens of publicistic writing and are often looked upon as such. However, newspaper evaluative writing unmistakably bears the stamp of newspaper style. Thus, it se^ms natural to regard newspaper articles, editorials included, as coming within the system qf English newspaper style. But it should be noted that while editorials and other arti- . cles in opinion columns are predominantly evaluative, newspaper feature articles, as a rule, carry a considerable amount of information, and the ratio of the informative and the evaluative varies substantially from ar­ticle to article.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1923