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Article Dans Une Revue Web journal of French Media Studies Année : 2001

Discourse analysis of newspaper headlines : a methodological framework for research into national representations

Résumé

The discussion of the theoretical and methodological issues involved in the discourse analysis of newspaper headlines which forms the basis of this research note, arises out of a study comparing the Australian and French press at the time of the crisis in Franco-Australian relations provoked by President Chirac's decision to recommence nuclear testing in the South Pacific in June 1995. This study formed part of a larger project: 'Xenophobia and xenophilia in Franco-Australian relations', undertaken by researchers from France and Australia and coordinated by Peter Cryle, University of Queensland, and Geneviève Zarate, ENS Fontenay/Saint-Cloud, which examined the representations of the two nations in a range of media over the months before, during and after the crisis. (1) To undertake the study of the press, a corpus was constituted from coverage of the crisis in both French and Australian daily papers. One of the challenges posed by study of the press is how to arrive at valid conclusions, given that the time-consuming nature of discourse analysis makes it difficult to undertake the detailed analysis of a large number of articles. We thus sought a method which would allow us to gain an overview of an extensive corpus. The solution which we arrived at, the study of headlines, offers a number of distinct advantages which we outline in this article. A corpus of headlines facilitates quantitative analysis, for example, a longitudinal study of the frequency of headlines on a particular issue can reveal the evolution in the prominence given to a topic over time; a comparison between newspapers can reveal the relative importance each paper gave to an issue during a particular period. However this research note concentrates on the broader theoretical and methodological issues involved in using headlines in research and identifies the linguistic features which are typical of them. It argues further that headlines are particularly revealing of the social, cultural and therefore national representations circulating in a society at a given time.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

halshs-01510703 , version 1 (19-04-2017)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-01510703 , version 1

Citer

Christine Develotte, Elizabeth Rechniewski. Discourse analysis of newspaper headlines : a methodological framework for research into national representations. Web journal of French Media Studies, 2001, 4 (1). ⟨halshs-01510703⟩
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