Models of structuring English news texts

This paper intends to analyze the presupposition triggers at both lexical and syntactic levels in selected online English and Kurdish political news texts. This is for the purpose of figuring out how texts in political news are achieving their political intentions via the use of presupposition triggers. Presupposition as a feature of language use is commonly exploited by language users. Expressions and constructions carrying presuppositions are called “presupposition triggers”. Its role in the news text is of specific importance in that writers of text tend to make use of this property so as to create either a favorable or unfavorable bias throughout the text this is to manipulate readers’ view. A descriptive analytic method has been used in this study. The data of this study is the political news texts in online English and Kurdish news channels, then 18 political news texts, which are released in the first half of the year 2020, have been selected randomly. Based on Levinson (1983), Yule (2010), and He’s (2003) classification of presupposition triggers the data have been analyzed and compared. The result of this study has shown that both English and Kurdish political news texts basically use both lexical and syntactic items of presupposition triggers. As for the lexical triggers, English political news texts constituted 530 times of occurring and Kurdish political news texts constituted 361 times. Regarding the syntactic level, the frequency of occurrence has been 185 times in the English news texts while it is 99 times in the Kurdish texts. All the syntactic items were more frequently used in the English texts except for the counter-factual conditionals which was the same as the Kurdish texts occurring 11 times. Adverbial clauses have recurred 23 times in the Kurdish texts and therefore ranking first among the other structural triggers. Finally, in the English texts, implicative verbs were noted only 1times while 11 occurrences were noted in the Kurdish texts.

The article deals with the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms of creation of false, perverted, hyper blemished sense – pseudo sense – in the texts of English fake news. It has been found out that each unit of the frame model of the concept LIE (AGENS, PATIENT, INSTRUMENT, BENEFICIENT, TEMPORATIVE, LOCATIVE) is obligatory in the texts of pseudo news, but its verbal content is different; so author’s (BENEFICIENT) intention and the purpose of the deceit are different too – either to exaggerate the news information or to give a false message. The features of verbal filling of two polar frames in fake news texts THE WORLD OF TRUTH vs THE WORLD OF LIE are revealed. The purpose of our scientific research is to uncover the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms of pseudo sense formation in English fake news texts through the reconstruction of mental spaces. In order to achieve the set goal and solve certain tasks, a complex of linguistic methods has been used, in particular for the study of semantics of the analyzed lexical units method of vocabulary definitions has been used. The text interpretation analysis of pseudo news has made it possible to classify them by two textual situations: “exaggeration of information” and “falsification of information”. The verbal filling of the slots of the framing model has been accomplished through the semantic analysis of the nominative units of fake news texts and true news texts. Cultural anal­ysis helped to correlate the content of pseudo news texts with general cultural information, and the method of conceptual analysis in combination with the method of frame modeling and the method of mental spaces reconstruction have been conducted for a description of the semantic structure of the concept LIE, the disclosure of linguistic and cognitive mech­anisms of the pseudo sense formation. The results of the study show that pseudo sense in the texts of false news is embodied through the described textual situations: 1) “falsification of information”, the verbal embodiment of which occurs through the following lexical units: falsification, false, bill of goods, etc.; 2) “exaggeration of information”, the meaning of which is actualized through the following tokens: exaggerate, embellish, extravagance, hype, hyperbole, inflation, overdo, overstate. Acknowledging the fact that the concept of lie (deceit) is the opposite of the concept of truth has contributed to the distinguishing of two polar frames in the pseudo news texts THE WORLD OF TRUTH vs THE WORLD OF LIE. It is stated in the conclusions that the removal of pseudo sense in English fake news texts, represented by two textual situations, requires the disclosure of mechanisms of its creation and comprehension by involving cognitive procedures of termination and extension together with the discursive and cognitive reconstruction of mental spaces of the fake news text components and using elements of the frame analysis technique.

Fifty-nine `Martyrs' Lists' of 1650 Palestinians killed during the Palestinian Uprising against the Israeli occupation are analyzed to shed light on what Freedman and Medway (1994: 2) call `the rhetorical action taken within a recurring social situation'. The analysis of the structure, style, syntax, rhetoric and use of metaphor in the lists (taken from the Palestinian magazine, al-Kateb) illustrates that, while they share some important structural and rhetorical features with news text, they differ from news reports in ways that enhance the lists' communicative function. The study also shows how al-Kateb uses the narrative text genre of the lists to comment on the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations and to prescribe the socially sanctioned behavior of sacrifice.

The aim of the paper is to describe genres of English media discourse with the application of Vantage Theory, which investigates category formation with respect to human orientation in space and time. The applied theory constructs categories on the basis of inherently stable and mobile coordinates at two levels: dominant, intensifying focal parameters of the category focus, and recessive, accentuating differences from the focus. It is found that the focus, i.e., the prototype of the media discourse category, is a news text representing recent or recurrent events with the focal parameters of factual information, newsworthiness, persuasion, brevity of form, and clear structure. The dominant vantage of media discourse is represented by an analytical text, intensifying key attributes of a news text by providing interpretation of facts, expert assessment of events, enumerating causes and consequences of the described issue, and stimulating the readers to find a solution to the problem. The category of media discourse has two recessive vantages. The literary recessive vantage decategorises informativity and highlights imagined or emotional descriptions of events in prognostic news texts, which inform the target audience about possible development of the situation in the future, feature articles, providing emotional human-interest stories, and fake news, structured like a prototypical news text, but offering fabricated or distorted facts. The second recessive vantage reflects oral decategorisation by bringing a news text closer to oral face-to-face interaction. This vantage encompasses blogs, which are a digital personal diary aimed at asynchronous responses from numerous followers, interviews, imitating real-life dialogue, and public speeches with a rhetor addressing mass audience via modern technologies.

Modality system, an important part of the interpersonal function of discourse, is generally used to indicate the author’s cognition and attitude, which contributes the basic representation of subjectivization. Meanwhile, news discourse generally emphasizes the objectivity principle and the author’s subjective standpoint and opinion should be avoided. As the modality system may involve the modal meaning of objectivity in different contexts, it has the characteristic of subjective-objective transformation in discourse. Therefore, the modality system in the news text can be used to hide the author’s subjective ideology, but also can express its objectivity. Taking American media related reports on Japan’s nuclear waste water discharge into the sea as examples, this thesis explores the subjective-objective transformation of modality system in news reports.

This critical analysis of discourse based on a corpus carefully studies language forms and discourse uses of hidden doers in news reports about a diplomatic event between China and the US. This study focuses on two main grammar structures: passive voice and using nouns to express actions. It analyzes how news discourses purposely hide or play down people who should take responsibility in describing diplomatic events. The research uses a self-made similar parallel corpus, which includes 18 typical news reports from China Daily and 18 from The New York Times respectively. Real research results show that structures that remove doers are widely used in news texts from both news agencies. However, The New York Times uses these language ways to hide doers much more frequently. This study not only proves the practical uses and analysis value of corpus linguistics methods in finding hidden rules of discourse in news language. It also shows the importance of checking small grammar choices when we learn how international news media build stories about sensitive diplomatic arguments and international conflicts. So it provides a view from language to help people understand media prejudice and hidden ideas in international news reporting.

As China's international competitiveness and stature increase, the importance of external publicity has become increasingly prominent. In external publicity, translation plays a crucial role and is essential for strengthening the nation's cultural soft power and building an accurate image of China. This study focuses on four-character idioms found in the Korean version of Xinhua news texts, constructing a Chinese-Korean parallel corpus. It systematically analyzes the translation methods applied to these idioms, leading to the following conclusions: First, various methods such as literal translation, free translation, adaptation, transliteration of Chinese characters + annotation, literal translation + annotation, addition + literal translation, and omission were employed in translating the idioms. Second, even the same idiom was translated into different expressions depending on factors such as the surrounding context, sentence structure, and the target audience. Third, during the analysis of the translations, instances were identified where the original intent or meaning was not fully conveyed, and suggestions for improvement were proposed accordingly. It is hoped that this research will contribute to future news text and external publicity translation efforts.

ABSTRACTTwitter has become an essential tool in newsrooms worldwide. Tweets included in news texts function as quotations and though this discursive practice is relatively recent it continues to grow in digital media. Many of these tweets are written in languages different from that of the receiving media company. This article analyzes how foreign tweets are presented to audiences and how they are translated when inserted in news texts. For this, we have examined the articles from the first five months of 2018 in the Universo Trump [Trump Universe] blog published by the Spanish digital newspaper El País. This blog publishes news about the president of the United States, the people he surrounds himself with as well as his government and it was selected because all the tweets cited in the articles are originally in English. This article presents the translation strategies used by the journalist-translators and we argue that the translation of tweets as quotes in news reports, especially when accompanied by a screenshot of the original tweet, makes the use of translation more obvious and more visible in the transmission of information.

This study aims to analyze the power of sentence structures in constructing conflict narratives in news reports about a foreign national (WNA) causing a disturbance in Kalibata City. Through a syntactic analysis approach, this research examines how sentence structures, lexical choices, and information hierarchies influence public perception of the incident. The data is analyzed using modern syntactic theory and critical discourse analysis, referencing the works of Fairclough (2020) and Halliday (2021), which emphasize the relationship between language structures and media power. The findings reveal that the use of passive constructions, subordinate clauses, and repetition of conflict-related elements intensify the dramatization and tension within the narrative. Thus, syntactic power in news texts does not merely convey information but also constructs a social perception of the reported conflict. These findings contribute to critical linguistic studies and media literacy.

Text similarity is an effective metric for estimating the text matching degree between two or more texts. Vector Space Model (VSM) is employed for the text similarity calculation in most instances. However, it is insufficient and ill-suited to solve the complex tasks since the high calculation dimension and computational complexity. Therefore, it is crucial to calculate the similarity of two news text, so that whether two reported news is the identical event or the same type of information would be ascertained. According to the analysis of the news reports, five basic factors in terms of “when”, “where”, “what”, “why”, and “who” are taken into account for distinguishing a news report. By analyzing these features, in this study, a method to calculate the similarity of news text is proposed. The proposed method fully integrates the influence of the five news feature words into the evaluation of text similarity, which avoids the problem happened in the text interference and computational efficiency to a large extent. There are four steps to execute the proposed method, i.e. extraction of the news elements, classification of these elements, calculation of the similarity, and comparison with available literatures. Experimental results suggest that our proposal outperforms the vector space cosine coefficient method, Jaccard coefficient method and entropy method in terms of the time complexity and computational accuracy.

Critical Discourse Analysis is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse regarding language as a form of social practice. As a specific discourse, news discourse is a representation of the journalists’ expression and construction of events, as well as readers’ understanding and cognition of the events reported. It functions as a carrier that transmits ideologies and social values. Recently, news reports on the trade conflicts between China and the US has been the focus of world attention. A study of news reports on Sino-US trade conflicts with Critical Discourse Analysis approach helps interpret the relation between language use and social contexts and reveal ideological significance and power struggle in language. Twenty pieces of news reports on China’s tariff actions on the United States, collected from The New York Times from 2018 to 2019 are studied and the result shows that the use of language in the news texts is not arbitrary, but rather dominated by the medium. The options of lexical expressions in news, the selection of clause types and the position of participants enable the medium to construct a negative image of China and to define China as an unfavorable country. The reasons deciding the language use in this discourse are the tension and balance of the power relation between the U.S. and China in the trade war, and the institution’s favor of the American interest, the American political hegemony and the advocacy of force.

This study examines written literacy outcomes among Saudi female university students undertaking an EFL journalistic course over fourteen weeks. It specifically aims to explore their competence in the English hard news genre. It, thus, seeks to address the following question: after completing the course, to what degree did students create texts structurally matching the conventional English news report? The significance of this study lies in its integration of media and education, employment of linguistic analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics, and use of English expert news reports for comparison with students’ journalistic texts. It deployed the genre-based pedagogy devised within the Sydney School to design the news writing course. Twenty-five students undertook such a course during the 2022 academic year. This study gathered those students’ writing to subject it to linguistic scrutiny, assessing each student over one news report after completing the course. It reports that, after the course, half of the class developed their ability to produce the genre of the standard English language hard news report. Those students created texts that matched the professional news articles in the corpus, thus effectively following the textual features of such a genre.

This book presents a complete method for the identification of metaphor in language at the level of word use. It is based on extensive methodological and empirical corpus-linguistic research in two languages, English and Dutch. The method is formulated as an explicit manual of instructions covering one chapter, the method being a development and refinement of the popular MIP procedure presented by the Pragglejaz Group in 2007. The extended version is called MIPVU, as it was developed at VU University Amsterdam. Its application is demonstrated in five case studies addressing metaphor in English news texts, conversations, fiction, and academic texts, and Dutch news texts and conversations. Two methodological chapters follow reporting a series of successful reliability tests and a series of post hoc troubleshooting exercises. The final chapter presents a first empirical analysis of the findings, and shows what this type of methodological attention can mean for research and theory.

Purpose The purpose of this work is to substantiate the modality of predicates as one of the key means of expressing objective epistemic modality in the aspect of popular science discourse and to describe the epistemic meaning contained in a proposition. Design/methodology/approach The methodology used in this research is based on the research of the category of effectiveness, evaluation, implemented in a specific rhetorical practice in the aspect of scientific, popular science discourse (Annushkin and Shcherbakov in Sci Dialogue 6:9–43, 2020; Balas in Innovative research in life sciences: pathways to scientific impact, public health improvement, and economic progress. Wiley, 2018; Danilevskaya in Bull Perm Univ Russ Foreign Philology 20–28, 2009; Golyshkin in Sci Dialogue 10:94–109, 2019; Golyshkina in Sci Dialogue 5:9–24, 2020); separate basic principles of modal epistemic logic, linguistic semantics of (Klemenova and Kudryashov in Philology, Journalism, 17(6):97–107, 2018; Layonz in Linguistic semantics. Introduction. Yazyki slavyanskoy kultury, Moscow, 2003; Paducheva in Sementic researches. Semantic of time and species in Russian language. Narrative semantics. Yazyki slavyanskoy kultury. Moscow, 2010; Paducheva in Egocentric units of language, Yazyki slavyanskoy kultury, 2019). Also, the research is based on the method of continuous sampling in the selection of practical material, the method of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Findings It is shown that the modern multicultural regions need flexible state management of their economy in two directions: migration flows and foreign economic activities. The problem of supporting high flexibility of state management of economy of multicultural regions consists in underdevelopment of the scientific and methodological provision of this management depending on the context and the current needs and capabilities of the region. Originality/value The results of the study showed that the predicates “show”, “concluded”, “according”, “according to/tells”, “found”, etc., by ascertaining the values also enter into epistemic modal component is a predicate intended to reaffirm the objective possibility of approval through the chain of logical conclusions and experimental data. This type of construction is found in the scientific information magazine “in the world of science” 6 times more than in “Science of technology”. In addition, these predicates perform the function of an epistemic obligation, when the epistemic responsibility for what is said “by default” lies with the author of a popular science text, as well as with the translator—correspondent—of this research and this responsibility. This fact confirms the rhetorical persuasiveness of the proposition. In texts complicated by indicators of epistemic modality with problematic confidence, the predicates “show”, “concluded”, “according to data”, “according to words/says”, “found”, etc. they form the epistemic responsibility of the speaker and the broadcaster for the truth of the proposition. Designs with problematic reliability are not typical for the journal “Science and technology”, they are mainly notable for the heading “Aircraft and aircraft construction”.KeywordsObjective epistemic modalityPopular science discourseRhetorical practiceEpistemic responsibilityPredicates with problematic validityPredicates with a stating elementJEL ClassificationL82I29

Problems of the Arctic region are often covered in the media of different countries of the world. The article focuses on comparative characteristics of references to information sources in English and German arctic media discourse. The markers of categories “evidentiality” and “quotation” provide references to information sources and increase the credibility of media texts. The purpose of this research is to reveal differences in the way of introducing information sources and in their semantics. Arctic media texts devoted to the environmental issues of the Arctic region served as the material for this study. The media texts were taken from online versions of English and German newspapers. The continuous sampling method, the statistical method, the semantic and comparative analyses were used. The study results show that evidential meaning “quotative” most often occurs in German arctic media discourse, whereas full quotation prevails in English arctic media discourse. The examples of direct evidentiality, hearsay and fragmentary quotation are scarcely represented in both languages. Particular researchers and experts are the most frequent information source in arctic media texts in both languages. There are also references to generalized designation of researchers and experts, specialists, documents, results of research and media in English and German arctic media discourse.