Private state in public media : potential subjective elements in french-speaking (online) news

Abstract

Digital media have come to constitute an inherent part of the nowadays mass media universe. In the context of the Web 2.0, legacy journalism has to face competing products which become more and more important in the public news reception. This thesis presents an investigation of the language use in legacy news and digital media, elucidating the pivotal question whether the expression of private state is similar (or not) in traditional and participatory media, and in different types of participatory media, i.e. citizen press and network journalism. Every news medium is linked to a given image or association, established by stereotypes of its journalists, the readership, and a particular news style. Therefore, it was assumed that private states are expressed differently in the three media, and that authorial presence and evaluative language use distinguish media from one another. Following a discourse analytic research angle by means of a corpus linguistic approach, including quantitative and qualitative sample analyses, the study investigated different types of potential subjective elements, i.e., linguistic means which can be used to express private states in a rather implicit, objective seeming way.(LALE - Langues et lettres) -- UCL, 201