Early Modern English News Discourse: Newspapers, pamphlets and scientific news discourse

Front Cover
Andreas H. Jucker
John Benjamins Publishing, May 20, 2009 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 227 pages
In Early Modern Britain, new publication channels were developed and new textual genres established themselves. News discourse became increasingly more important and reached wider audiences, with pamphlets as the first real mass media. Newspapers appeared, first on a weekly and then on a daily basis. And scientific news discourse in the form of letters exchanged between fellow scholars turned into academic journals. The papers in this volume provide state-of-the art analyses of these developments.
The first part of the volume contains studies of early newspapers that range from reports of crime and punishment to want ads, and from traces of religious language in early newspapers to the use of imperatives. The second part is devoted to pamphlets and provides detailed analyses of news reporting and of impoliteness strategies. The last section is devoted to scientific news discourse and traces the early publication formats in their various manifestations.
 

Contents

Newspapers pamphlets and scientific news discourse in Early Modern Britain
1
Newspapers
11
Crime and punishmen
13
Reading late eighteenthcentury want ads
31
Alwayes in te Orbe of honest Mirth and next to Truth
57
Religious language in early English newspapers?
73
As silly as an Irish Teague
91
Place yer bets and Let us hope
115
Pamphlets
135
Comparing seventeenthcentury news broadsides and occasional news pamphlets
137
Scientific news discourse
187
Joyful News out of the Newfound World
189
News filtering processes in the Philosophical Transactions
205
Index
223
The Pragmatics Beyond New Series
229
Copyright

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