Fruttaldo, Antonio (2016) Crawling in the deep: A corpus-based genre analysis of news tickers. [Tesi di dottorato]

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This thesis investigates a relatively new textual genre found in TV news broadcasts, which made its first appearance on the morning of 9/11. The genre under investigation is that of news tickers (or crawlers), the string of texts that scroll in the lower third space of a TV screen on certain TV news channels and programmes, displaying a summary of the major news stories or announcing a given breaking news story. Thus, through a corpus-based analysis, we will try to better define the genre under investigation. In particular, our corpus-based analysis has allowed us to underline specific phenomena of hybridisation in the genre of news tickers as displayed on the BBC World News. These phenomena can be ascribed to what Meech (1999) defines as brandcasting, which refers to the vast array of corporate branding techniques that broadcasters use in order to project their brand identity. These branding techniques are highly frequent in the corpus of news tickers taken from the BBC World News and, while some of them may be classified as overt promotional strategies (Clearly and Coffey 2008, 2011), others may be seen as subtly achieving the same purpose. Additionally, thanks to the use of corpus linguistic methodologies, our investigation has also highlighted the mixed nature of the genre of news tickers, proven by the merging of two functions traditionally belonging to the journalistic genres of headlines and lead paragraphs. Finally, by focusing on how specific news values are enhanced in the genre under investigation, we have further confirmed our hypotheses on the genre of news tickers. In Chapter 1, we will introduce the topic of our research project and we will further set out the aims of our investigation. In Chapter 2, we will briefly outline an overview of the social and professional context where news tickers have slowly shaped themselves in the format that nowadays we see on major TV news broadcasts. In particular, we will offer an overview of the various works that have investigated this genre, underlining the absence of a specific literature in discourse studies on graphic elements displayed on TV news channels and TV news programmes. In Chapter 3, we will offer an introduction to the methodological framework used for our analysis, which adopts corpus linguistic methodologies as its main analytical tool in order to highlight given linguistic patterns in the genre of news tickers. Additionally, this chapter also offers an overview of genre analysis (Biber 1988; Tribble 1999; Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993, 2004; Xiao and McEnery 2005), lexical priming (Hoey 2005; O’Donnell et al. 2012), and news values (Bell 1991; Bednarek 2006; Bednarek and Caple 2012a, 2012b, 2014; Caple and Bednarek 2015; Potts, Bednarek and Caple 2015). Chapter 4, on the other hand, offers a step-by-step description of the way the corpora that we have used in order to carry out our investigation have been collected and prepared for our analysis. Additionally, the chapter also describes the software that we have used in order to carry out our investigation and, by doing so, a preliminary analysis of the genre will also be introduced in the form of an initial investigation into the lexical richness of the genre of news tickers when compared to other genres found in the same professional environment. In Chapter 5, we will introduce the analysis carried out thanks to corpus linguistic methodologies of the genre of news tickers. We will start with the examination of the textual realisation of this genre and, then, thanks to a keyword analysis of the corpus of news tickers, we will both underline the hybrid and mixed nature of this genre, demonstrated by specific linguistic patternings. Additionally, we will further test our claims by analysing the way specific news values are enhanced in news tickers, thus, highlighting how this type of analysis, which combines both a quantitative and a qualitative approach to the data, can reveal which values are particularly enhanced by editors in presenting news stories in this format.

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