Since its first steps in the early seventeenth century, the development of news writing as a genre has been strongly affected by socio-historical circumstances and changes. Indeed, the intertwining of society and language use is rightly foregrounded in the very introduction of this book, edited by Bös and Kornexl, who clearly state that ‘by its very nature, news is a societal phenomenon couched in linguistic form’ (p. xiii).

The volume is the outcome of a conference on historical news discourse (Third International Conference on Historical News Discourse – CHINED III) held in Rostock (Germany) in May 2012; it is divided into three sections focusing respectively on (a) metadiscourse, (b) modes of reference and audience orientation and (c) shifting styles within news discourse. All the chapters constructively rely on both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis; indeed, they are based on a wide range of archives and historical corpora, which are the backdrop for insightful analyses and thought-provoking considerations.

The first chapter, by Nicholas Brownlees (‘“We have in some former bookes told you”: The significance of metatext in 17th-century news’), covers the time frame 1620–95, that is, between the first coranto publications and the lapsing of the Licensing Act in England. The author focuses on (a) terms used for publication types, (b) modes of presenting news and (c) concepts of ‘news’, so as to study the metatextual markers exploited by the early writers in relation to the news they were presenting. Words like book(e), discourse, gazette, account, report, intelligence and even translation appear to acquire specific meanings and add value to the publications themselves, thus also providing information on the attitude to news of the editor-cum-news-writers of the seventeenth century. The data – drawn from the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN), the Burney Collection of Newspapers and The London Gazette – point to no steady inclination towards more or less metadiscourse in the early periodical news publications, influenced as they were by a number of both linguistic and contextual aspects, which are accurately identified and foregrounded by Brownlees. Editorial aims, commercial concerns and also the degree of external political control clearly testify to the strong relationship between genre development and socio-historical-political aspects.

Moving forward in time, in ‘Conceptualisations, sources and agents of news: Key terms as signposts of changing journalistic practices’, Birte Bös analyses the Rostock Newspaper Corpus (1700-2000) to discuss the potential semantic and functional changes of sets of key terms. Her final aim is to understand how the use (or lack of use) of these terms is related to historical changes in news writing. Indeed, like Brownlees, Bös does not simply study the terms linguistically, but rather relates her analysis to language-external context. Her in-depth scrutiny of sets of terms like news, advice, information, intelligence, tidings, account and report, and of their possibly evaluative connotations, corroborates the tenet that the conceptualization of news can be understood only if wider context is taken into consideration. The data provide insights on the degree of credibility of news, on the coexisting types of sources of information and on the participants in news production processes. A particularly interesting finding is that the end of the nineteenth / beginning of the twentieth century appears to be the time when metadiscursive comments regarding the conceptualization and production of news decreased substantially, thus testifying to the impact of changing journalistic practices introduced in the so-called Age of New Journalism.

Adverbials, prepositional phrases, noun phrases and clauses encoding time and place are the main topic of Claudia Claridge's chapter, ‘News in space and time’, which focuses on five corpus samples from 1671, 1721, 1781, 1860 and 1991 from three different corpora: the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus, the Rostock Newspaper Corpus and the press section of the Freiburg–LOB Corpus. Judging from the data, precision and consistency in time and place reference do not seem to have been key issues in early news publications. Specifically, with reference to time, Claridge notices that the deictic centre of time reference varies widely within the same newspaper issue, also due to the different calendars employed by the countries mentioned; this obliged readers to interpret deictic items in the texts they read. Moreover, there does not seem to have been a regular trend in the occurrences through the centuries either. In contrast, the prototypical deictics referring to place – namely here and there, which were largely centred on the location of the correspondent and on the origin of transmission routes – show a steady decline. While acknowledging the need for further study in this field, Claridge suggests that the overall (though not always consistent) decline in deictics in news publications may be due to a stylistic shift towards the less oral, more elaborate styles typical of the eighteenth century. Moreover, she points to interesting trends that appear to emerge, such as differences between weekly and daily publications, on the one hand, and the increasing importance of cultural proximity in news writing, on the other.

Shifting the focus from news reports to advertisements, in ‘Changing genre conventions and socio-cultural change: Person-mention in 19th-century English advertisements’ Minna Palander-Collin studies the forms of mentioning of advertisers, audiences and other persons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as a possible way to gain insights into genre conventions and sociocultural changes. Specifically, the frequency and functional analysis of the texts from The Times and The Morning Post point to the fact that initially persons were mentioned in advertisements to a great extent, possibly due to the fact that promotional texts were focused on establishing credentials for the advertised commodity via people (be it mention of manufacturers or audience), so as to target a specific group and to create respectability. In contrast, later, the frequency of person-mention decreased, except for advertiser mention, possibly indicating a shift of the focus on product description and appraisal. Hence, bearing in mind that ‘mentioning persons in texts serves as a linguistic link to possible roles, norms and structures of the sociocultural context’ (p. 83), the author convincingly sets this change within the frame of a sociological model, once again testifying to the strong interrelationship between genre development and societal/cultural conditions.

Societal and cultural changes also come into play in Sarah Borde's chapter on death notices, ‘Late Modern English death notices: Transformations of a traditional text type’, where the typical aspects of this genre display social and cultural norms and conventions. Using the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Corpus of English Death Notices and following up on the only studies on this topic, carried out by Udo Fries, Borde traces the macro- and micro-linguistic developments of this text type over the two centuries by means of a ‘qualitative function-to-form approach’. To do so, she analyses the position and length of the death notice in the newspaper, its layout and typography and the order of the individual entries. To the macrostructure template developed by Fries (Reference Fries and Bridges1990: 60) Borde adds new aspects like ‘funeral’, ‘requests’ and ‘grief’, so as to cover all the information regarding the individual (name, occupation, relation, origin, age) and his/her death (date, circumstances), bearing in mind that death notices increased their degree of precision particularly over the centuries under scrutiny. Her analysis convincingly points to the fact that this genre has more than one communicative function, in Searle's terms (Reference Searle1976: 1–23); indeed, along with their widely acknowledged informative role, death notices may also state the feelings of the announcers towards the death of the deceased person (‘expressives’) and even provide polite suggestions (‘directives’).

The following chapter, ‘Medical news in England 1665–1800 in journals for professional and lay audiences’, by Irma Taavitsainen, touches upon the early development of scientific and medical news discourse, both for professionals and for lay people. In the corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts 1500–1700, she analyses (a) medical case reports of unusual events, experimental reports and book reviews of professional medical discourse in two professional journals (The Philosophical Transactions for the Royal Society and The Edinburgh Medical Journal) and (b) medical writing for lay people, dealing with a variety of health matters, including miracle cures, unusual cases of childbirth, accidents and casualties, monstrous births and also recipes, all published in the lay magazine The Gentleman's Magazine. Fruitfully combining the quantitative data provided by corpus analysis software and qualitative assessment, Taavitsainen shows the steadily increasing professionalization, on the one hand, and the gradual differentiation between lay and professional writing, on the other. Indeed, the intertwining of statistical quantitative methods of keyword analysis and qualitative analysis clearly brings to the fore the transition towards more modern approaches to science and medicine in professional discourse, along with stricter professionalization focusing on facts and objective experimentation. In turn, the style of non-professional discourse shows a higher degree of interpersonal features and a greater concern for the patients’ role and also for home therapy and home medicine.

Yet another developing genre covered by this volume on early news publications is that of crime reports, as discussed by Elisabetta Cecconi in her contribution entitled ‘Comparing discourse construction in 17th-century news genres: A case study of murder reports’, where she compares seventeenth-century news broadside ballads, occasional news pamphlets, newsbooks and The London Gazette. To highlight their specificities in murder presentation and reporting, first she focuses on (a) layout and content page, (b) proto-lead, (c) editorial metadiscourse, (d) the way the writer presents the murderer and the victim, along with (e) evaluative adjectives and manner adverbs qualifying the main event. She then concentrates on the body of the news texts, particularly on how authorial comments, metadiscourse and factuality are distributed in the reports of the four genres under consideration. Her fine-grained analysis reveals similarities on both layout and stock of evaluative lexis, which indicate a certain degree of continuity among the genres. However, the most important finding seems to be the steadily increasing reference to factuality in crime pamphlets. This leads the author to interesting conclusions with reference to the gradual shift towards the informative value of news; indeed, the linguistic patterns show a significant change in news values and ideology in the seventeenth century, the most important aspect being the foregrounding of factuality and precision to the detriment of the author's voice.

Alexander Haselow also combines quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis in his chapter, entitled ‘Speech-like syntax in written texts: Changing syntactic conventions in news discourse’. His corpus is hard news from The Sun and the Guardian between 1900 and 2013, and his main aim is to identify the degree of informalization/colloquialization in British written news discourses. His analysis of conjunctions (but, and, because), textual connectors, fragmented sentences, isolated main/subordinate clauses and non-clausal units shows the increasing colloquialization of news reporting. Specifically, conjunctions and and but appear to be exploited more and more as discourse-structuring devices rather than as sentence-internal connectors; sentence clausal and non-clausal increments rise in number, thus reducing the complexity of syntactic constructions and increasing loose sequentiality of clauses and non-clausal units. Finally, the growing avoidance of embedding is viewed as a strategy to raise the information weight of units that would otherwise be semantically subordinated. These results offer thought-provoking insights on two levels; in the first place the author sets such trends towards informality of written discourse within the broader sociological shift towards social informality, including also educational practices and dressing conventions; secondly, the author hints at the current new information technologies and digital media, which have an impact on the producers and distributors of news as well, to the point that ‘news writing and reading has acquired a more instantaneous character, bringing it closer to the conditions of on-line speech production’ (p. 216).

Finally, the chapter by Isabel Ermida (‘Playing upon news genre conventions: The case of Mark Twain's news satire’) focuses on the structure and style of ten spoof news articles written for newspapers by Mark Twain between 1862 and 1865. Blending together social criticism, humour and intentional deception, Twain ranges from creating imaginary situations to transforming true events to satirize the manias of his society. With the help of the Model of News Satire she has developed (Ermida Reference Ermida, Chovanec and Ermida2012), the author casts light not only on Mark Twain's socio-historical background, but also on the varied nature of his texts, merging together a variety of different components. Specifically, its intertextual feature makes the structure of these texts similar to that of a news story, with an inverted pyramid pattern and third-person narrative format. Moreover, the texts take on a critical dimension since they include comments on society; and finally, the text is arranged lexico-pragmatically and rhetorically in such a way as to trigger comicity, also relying on the reader's general culture and knowledge. Interestingly, all these components are concomitantly at work in the texts under study, thus making Mark Twain the forerunner of the genre of news satire.

The thorough analysis of the multi-faceted nature of (the early) news publications, embodying and featuring more than one illocutionary function, on the one hand, and of the key role played by socio-historical aspects in shaping such genres, on the other, are among the strengths of this book, where each chapter relies on quantitative data to provide well-grounded qualitative discussions and conclusions. Most of all, the analyses illustrated in all chapters testify to the fact that historical linguistic actualizations are strongly couched in the cultural background of their own times; consequently, extra-linguistic context and co-text are crucial for fully understanding discourse and text production, in the same way as social conventions and changing cultures are voiced in the most prominent written genres at different historical times, thus helping us understand past and present societies with a clearer, more comprehensive, wide-ranging view.