The Linguistics of Newswriting

Front matter

Daniel Perrin a

John Benjamins Publishing Company

AILA Applied Linguistics Series (AALS)

Preface

“Nevertheless, the gaps in research on news language remain very much as identified by Bell and Garrett (1998) — there is a dearth of work on the production of news language and to a lesser extent on its reception.” That was how Allan Bell concluded his article about news language for the Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Bell, 2006, 617). How right he was.

Investigating text production processes in media workplaces remains a gap in all the disciplines involved: writing research, journalism studies, and applied linguistics. Linguistics first focused on written language, later on it described conversations as processes, and only then rediscovered written language from a process perspective. But media texts are usually still investigated as products only, without “empirical ethnographic considerations” (Widdowson, 2000, 22).

That is why I started combining ethnography with: computer logging from text production research; micro-macro perspectives from sociolinguistics; and language mediation approaches from applied linguistics. I began a series of increasingly complex field studies of journalistic text production in 1995: first projects on a local level, then on a national level, and finally projects on European and international levels.

More and more researchers are now building on the research designs developed in these projects, not only for news production research but also for investigating text production processes in domains such as translation, education, and academia. This approach to doing applied linguistics in professional settings is what I aim to transfer from the German context to the international community of applied linguistics.

This book is meant to show that, why, and how (a) Allan Bells “dearth of work” is actually being addressed now; (b) some, still mainly European, applied linguists are in a pole position to fill in “the gaps”; and (c) applied linguistics is the very discipline to address socially crucial topics such as language use in the workplace and in the public sphere.

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