News Across Five Continents: Newspaper Language in the Context of Regional and Functional Variation

This volume presents a thorough analysis of newspaper language from a regional and functional perspective. Based on a collection of 4,000 newspaper articles from five English-speaking regions and five different news domains, it discusses the benefit of register analysis in a systemic functional framework to comparing varieties and determining their developmental status. For this purpose, it starts with revisiting the states of the art in the fields of media studies, text analysis and variational studies, and then combines the three strands to result in an operationalization of register parameters and thus the basis for the analysis. The results are presented for each parameter as well as in terms of correlations, and are visualized frequently. After a discussion of the findings, the work considers their implications for the theory and method as well as the author’s ideas for enhancements and future research.