Chapter Overview

• • corpus stylistics

• • communication in online journalism

• • checklist of corpus stylistic categories

• • the English Web 2018 (enTenTen18) corpus

• • the Arabic Web 2012 (arTenTen12, Stanford Tagger) corpus

• • corpus stylistic analysis of the subcorpus

Introduction

This chapter is slightly different from the previous eight chapters. In this chapter, we combine techniques from CORPUS LINGUISTICS with stylistic analysis. In other words, we combine qualitative with quantitative analysis. For this reason, the layout of the chapter is slightly different. We are not analysing a text. We are analysing a large collection of texts, or a body of language data, that is available online and not presented in physical form in the chapter. The checklist is also different. It takes the form of steps to follow in retrieving the corpus, looking up the patterns, and reporting the findings. In the activities for further practice, there are also no texts to present. You will be carrying out corpus stylistic analyses of data in a number of corpora.

Communication in online journalism

The internet is now the most widely used medium of communication. It is convenient and accessible round the clock. It has made available vast resources of texts. Online newspapers, magazines, and e-books, for example, are one click away, and almost free. The introduction of hand-held technology and mobile applications has further enhanced the accessibility of information. Many young people today find much of what they are looking for on the internet, which is accessible on their smartphones. My students report that Twitter is where they read news, watch games, make friends, communicate, and learn. In other words, it is their TV, radio station, virtual coffee shop, newspaper, and so forth.

Information gathered from different sources is presented in websites. A website is a collection of web pages, much like a book. There are many types of websites, classified according to content and purpose. These include blogs, information websites, government websites, business websites, personal websites, and news websites. Huge amounts of data gathered from these websites are stored electronically in what are known as corpora.

Online journalism is progressively moving away from limiting itself to the written mode. Most websites today are multimodal. They communicate in at least five different modes.