Congratulations to Dr. Difei (Lynn) Zhang, who defended her dissertation (“Flipping those pages, swiping that screen: a corpus-based analysis of the digital transformation of the news register”) today!
In her dissertation Dr. Zhang investigated the linguistic features of online news as a unique register as well as the development, production and consumption of news in general. Her main research questions were:
RQ 1. What are the linguistic features of online news, and what do they inform us about linguistic research on online news?
- What are some of the unique syntactic patterns of online news articles?
- What is its relationship with printed/spoken news?
- How does online news as a new register challenge the traditional spoken/written dichotomy?
RQ 2. What impact does online news have on the development, consumption and production of news writing in general?
- News consumption: how have people’s habits of consuming news changed/shifted in recent years?
- News production: how have the guidelines/procedures for producing/writing/editing news articles changed/shifted in recent years?
- Does online news as a dominate sub-register contribute to this change/shift? If so, in what ways?
