Idioma: Español
Fecha: Subida: 2021-04-14T00:00:00+02:00
Duración: 26m 56s
Lugar: Conferencia
Visitas: 988 visitas

The outbreak of coronavirus in British headlines: A lexico-semantic analysis (...)

Encarnación Almazán-Ruiz and Aroa Orrequia-Barea (Universidad de Jaén)

Descripción

From the very beginning, the coverage of coronavirus disease has been a trendy topic in
newspapers all over the world. When the new disease was not yet a pandemic, it was
presented to readers as a threat and as an imminent risk concerning the Western world.
Undeniably, the power of the press lies in how the language is used and how the news is
presented to the readers. Consequently, the use of the language presenting the news items can
reveal noteworthy and significant traits from a linguistic perspective because language can be
used not only to inform but also to influence the readers’ viewpoint and opinions about a
news issue.
The main aim of this study is to describe the lexical and semantic features of the language
used in the British headlines covering coronavirus news items. As three basic lexical
categories can be distinguished in any language: nouns, verbs and adjectives (Baker, 2004),
these three items will be considered in this corpus-based research. From a descriptive
perspective, the paper focuses on a lexico-semantic analysis of the language used in the
headlines of a group of selected newspapers to compare and contrast the coverage of
COVID-19 news items
The corpus consists of a total of 71,529 words compiled into 3,437 online headlines,
published during the first months of the current year and coinciding with the initial stage of
the disease spread (from 20th January to 20th February). A total of eight British newspapers
were used for the data collection. Thus, four so-called quality ones: The Guardian, The
Independent, The Telegraph and The Financial Times; and four popular ones: The Mirror,
The Sun, The Express and The Daily Mail.
Two corpus management tools have been used to accomplish this research: Sketch Engine
and the programming language R. Both of them allow the researcher to do an automatic
analysis of the text and basic statistics from Corpus Linguistics. The latter has been used to
extract the most frequent words of each category, i.e., nouns, verbs and adjectives, of each
corpus. The former provides an in-depth analysis of these words and their surroundings. We
have made use of its two most important functions, namely Word Sketch and Concordances
to research into the collocations and patterns of the previously extracted words.
Preliminary findings highlight the use of similar keywords and semantic fields in both types
of newspapers. However, the register plays an essential role in the word choice, especially in
popular newspapers since this aspect is shown by the use of more colloquial or informal
words. In fact, there are such words which do not even appear in the corpus of the quality
newspapers. The semantic features of the previous lexical categories show that words with
worrying or alarming connotations are frequently used in the analysed headlines. As
expected, the polarity of the words is negative and this semantic feature can be shown using a
wide variety of different words in terms of register, as it happens when headlines refer to the
disease. As a tentative conclusion, it can be stated that the coronavirus disease has been
presented as a serious threat since the beginning of the disease spread even when there were
few cases in the Western world and the lexical choice used in the analysed headlines
demonstrates it.

Propietarios

Congreso Cilc 2021

Comentarios

Nuevo comentario

Serie: CILC2021: Estudios gramaticales basados en corpus / Corpus-based grammatical studies (+información)