Speaker
Description
Keywords: newspaper, headlines, emotions, disaster news, tabloids, broadsheets, invoked, described.
While described emotion can be identified rather precisely in news items “it is much more difficult to get to grips with the emotion that is actually invoked in the reader” (Ungerer 1997: 307): The potential discrepancy between invoked and described emotion poses substantial challenges in linguistic emotion research. Thus, this study investigates which possible emotionalisation strategies are used in online headlines reporting on the emotion-prone subject of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe (2011). The dataset, consisting of 327 headlines, is part of a larger, diachronic corpus of the news coverage of nuclear disasters in the British press. There has been linguistic research on emotionalisation in print news and online news (Ungerer 1997, Bednarek 2016); online headlines as important stand-alone units in digital news discourse still await further exploration. In my contribution, I focus particularly on the challenges of analysing invoked emotions in online headlines.
The sub-corpus investigated in this study contains headlines from the British tabloid as well as quality online press ranging from the day of the incident to one week after, thus, accounting for potential shifts in emotionalisation strategies. The analysis combines a quantitative approach, drawing on the software tool AntConc, with qualitative explorations of the dataset.
Online news is accessible “beyond the temporal context of their […] publication” (Chovanec 2014: 60) giving their headlines special importance: Possible emotional click-baiting techniques and their interplay of described and invoked emotions will be examined shedding light on differences in tabloids and quality newspapers.
References:
Bednarek, Monika. 2016. “Investigating evaluation and news values in news items that are shared through social media.” Corpora: Corpus-based Language Learning, Language Processing and Linguistics 11 (2), 227–257.
Chovanec, Jan. 2014. Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News. From canonical headlines to online news texts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ungerer, Friedrich. 1997. “Emotions and emotional language in English and German news stories.” In: Niemeier, Susanne and René Dirven (eds.). The Language of Emotions. Conceptualization, Expression, and Theoretical Foundation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 307–328.
