Understanding Social and Linguistic Change

This chapter develops the argument that language is a constitutive part of both the social realm and the production and dissemination of news coverage through the media. It provides an overview of available research on technological and linguistic changes in the print news media including the Wapping revolution, debates about media standards (tabloidization) and the influence of the Internet and social media. It outlines historical dynamics in language such as densification, democratisation, informalisation and grammaticalisation and distinguishes long-term, middle-term and short-term changes. The complex forces at work in the media and beyond are the backdrop against which the detailed historical analysis of the book utilises linguistic theories (frame semantics) and corpus linguistic research tools (concordances, collocations).