A Glimpse at the Discourse of News Values

This book review analyses the monograph authored by Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, The discourse of news values. The book is divided into four parts and it deals with theoretical aspects, empirical studies, and future research avenues. The goals of the book are to introduce the readers to the discourse of news values (hereinafter DNVA) and to promote research that brings together multimodality, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. The authors acknowledge the fact that studies which combine multimodality, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics are rare and they explain this by the complexity of their undertaking. Bednarek and Caple draw on the interdisciplinarity of the book which brings together corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis in analysing news media. The authors adhere to the definition of discourse as language in use and consider discourse as multimodal. The multimodal approach adopted by the authors differs from other approaches. The authors explain how corpus linguistics facilitates and is reflected in their analysis: while research that combines corpus linguistics and discourse analysis are quite frequent, the authors observe that research which blends multimodality, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics is quite rare. Throughout the book the authors examine news as semiotic practice, introduce and expand the concept of news values which contributes to discourse analysis and enables discourse analysts to take into account professional contexts of the news media texts under investigation. The authors plead for extending discourse of news values by other researchers who analyse news discourse and hope that the book will represent a building block for future research.