Historical Corpus Stylistics

Patrick Studer is a Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Zurich and a Researcher in Linguistics at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

"'Patrick Studer is one of the world's leading experts in early English newspapers. He has an intimate and detailed knowledge of both their content matters and their stylistic peculiarities. In this book he provides a rich and detailed introduction to these newspapers within their historical and socio-cultural context and he develops a set of sophisticated corpus-stylistic tools necessary for their analysis. There is a lot to learn not only about newspapers in eighteenth-century England but also about the English language at the turning point from Early Modern English to Present-day English.' (Andreas H. Jucker, Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland) 'This is an outstanding book: theoretically and methodologically innovative yet well-anchored in the literature; wide-ranging yet systematic and detailed. It makes a real contribution to diverse fields. It sheds light on how corpus-based approaches can be deployed in the study of style, how styles interact with their social and pragmatic contexts and how change in style comes about... All this is written up in polished prose.' (Dr Jonathan Culpeper, University of Lancaster, UK Briefly reviewed in the Year's work in English Studies journal, vol 89, No. 1)"

• Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I: Socio-Stylistic Dimensions; 1. Historical Corpus Stylistics and Early News Media; 2. Media Performance and Organization Profiles; 3. Media Variation and Stylistic Change; 4. Performance and Style: A Socio-Stylistic Profile; Part II: Technologically Facilitated Innovation; 5. Visual Foregrounding in Early Eighteenth-Century Headlines; 6. Syntactic Foregrounding in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century News Discourse; Part III: Situational Aspects: News Context and Early Media Change; 7.Macrotextual Foregrounding Strategies in Eighteenth-Century News Discourse; 8. Microtextual Foregrounding Strategies: Comment and News Context; Conclusion; References; Appendices I-III; Index.