The Language of Inequality in the News: A Discourse Analytic Approach - Softcover

Toolan, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1108464203 ISBN 13: 9781108464208

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Why in the early 1970s does The Times reject the idea of a national lottery, as rewarding luck not merit and effort, but warmly welcome one by the 1990s? Why in the 1970s do the Daily Mail's TV reviews address serious contemporary themes such as class- and race-relations, whereas forty years later they are largely concerned with celebrities, talent shows, and nostalgia? Why does the Conservative Chancellor in the 2010s mention 'Britain' so very often, when the Conservative Chancellor in the 1970s scarcely does at all? Covering news stories spanning fort-five years, Michael Toolan explores how wealth inequality has been presented in centre-right British newspapers, focusing on changes in the representation may have helped present-day inequality seem justifiable. Toolan employs corpus linguistic and critical discourse analytic methods to identify changing lexis and verbal patterns and gaps, all of which contribute to the way wealth inequality was represented in each of the decades from the 1970s to the present.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Toolan is Professor of English Language at the University of Birmingham. He has been researching in literary linguistics and discourse analysis for many years, and has published extensively on Stylistics and Narrative. He is editor of the Journal of Literary Semantics, and is current Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1108464203
• ISBN 13: 9781108464208
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 254