Step 4
The Daily Telegraph is a broadsheet which often stands out in support of the Conservative party, while Morning Star is a tabloid , which focus is mainly social trade union issues from a social democratic perspective. I have suggested initially in Step 1 that both articles have the same subject, but reflects different ideology on that matter and while one is more formal and positive the second is less formal and negative. The texts indeed do have a common subject matter and they represented in a very contrasting language. Both authors refer to the same news – Budget speech given by Chancellor George Osborne on 23 March 2011. We can see both texts contain references to Mr Osborne in a subject matter, the current country economy, UK Government, wealthy companies that can benefit from new introductions and less wealthy workers which might suffer from side effects of the new regulations. Authors deal differently with the topic areas. While both articles show some generalised expertise and some degree of knowledge in a topic area.
The two however are very different. One is focused on factual news delivered in an seemingly objective way, while the second still contains some factual information, its primary concern is with opinion and it comes across more editorial. Both use specialist terms and basic knowledge of political directions and economical situation assumed, showing authors aimed at a certain readership ( usually a Telegraph reader has a conservative view and Morning Star readers more concerned with social issues). Analysis of processes showed that the first Article is more focused on delivery of news (higher frequency of processes shows that), while the second also delivers the news, but has a lower number of processes and lower variety of its types. Not many countable participants and many passive forms with deleted actor in the Telegraph article show that the authors main aim was not to highlight the specific participants of events, but to create more objective delivery of news. However, slight positioning still can be achieved in contrast of the benefits and side effects discussed. Which I think, still is the case here. Morning Star however, uses many countable human actors, mostly used as a personal reference to the Mr Osborne, and not as many passive forms. This indicates that the delivery is not as objective and the focus on actors is much greater. Significantly lower number of circumstances of time in text 2 also shows that stating the facts isn’t the main priority.
Modality in analysis showed where my initial intuition was wrong. Article one is rather neutral than positive. In fact, in the part of the article where the benefits of the new Budget introduced there is a presence of weak modality reflecting presumption or probability. Which means author was not confident in supporting the new legislation strongly at this early stage. A couple of mental processes show a little weakness in Mr Osborne’s position.
The texts also show two very different writing personas, the first one is more expert and impartial and the second one less specialist and to some degree interpersonal. The Daily Telegraph using neutral specialist language ( although shared situation assumed), while second one focuses solely on negatives and passes judgements using colloquial language, many metaphors and personal references. The difference also can be traced in analysing the amount of evaluative language used, which reflects authorial opinions (as well as discussed modality analysis).
Overall the analysis conducted provides some support for my initial impressions: there are obvious similarities in subject matter and obvious differences in authors’ ideology reflected and actual delivery of the news. However, I was mistaken about the positivity and positioning of the Article 1 – there aren’t many positive lexis occurrences or mood adjuncts in the text and it is rather neutral than positive with author being more objective and impartial than I initially thought and article text 2 is, as I correctly identified, reflecting negative opinions and clearly assumes shared political views from the reader. I think analysis of lexical density, grammatical complexity and thematic organisation of both texts would benefit greatly my work in showing primary focus of both authors as well as level of formality, but the limit of words and the task directives limited my choice in doing it.
Step 5
With help of corpus analysis we could see the frequency of some colloquial or evaluative forms we found in Articles to see its frequency across different registers to outline if ones more common in other register rather than news. I’d imagine these are more common in speech, but only the search across a really large corpora could prove my intuition.
The corpus analysis could also benefit this analysis if were looking at mode variable, as I mentioned previously. Corpus analysis could help us to calculate lexical density of both texts and would allow us to compare how close are the numbers to a general news register statistics number.
Interesting search could be done if we had two large corpora consisting of many first and second authors works. We could then look for interesting collocations frequencies between the two in order to find any patterns in the texts analysed. It could help us to establish whether the collocations found are part of personal style or authors choice to position the reader.
If we had large corpora of Telegraph and Morning Star publications the searches on reference to Chancellor Osborne would be helpful to see in which he appears more often and what are the collocations. For example author of the Article 2 refers to him as “ The shifty Chancellor” (24), and it would be interesting to see if Morning star generally has a pattern of having a negative reference to Chancellor.
Also we could compare the process type percentage statistics between The Telegraph and Morning Star corpora as well as compare these to the results we got for The Article 1 and Article 2 to see if there’s a pattern. Any interesting frequency tables within the two corpora could possibly show some more patterns, which we could spot in the Articles given. Interesting to see, for example, if extraposed that-clause is naturally more frequent in Telegraph texts over Morning Star ones or generally in Broadsheets over Tabloid newspapers.
2504 words in total.
Appendices
Article 1
(The Daily Telegraph [online] 23 March 2011: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/budget/ 8401074/Budget-2011-George-Osborne-fuels-economy-with-surprise-cut-in-petrol-duty.html). [Accessed 23 March 2011]
Article 2
(Morning Star [online] 23 March 2001: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/ content/view/full/102631). [Accessed 23 March 2011]
Appendices 2
by
kalinka (student)
