Style in American newspaper language: Use and usage

The present work is a corpus-based study of the frequency and distribution of a wide array of linguistic features in American newspaper English. The investigation is based on a corpus of American newspaper texts (9,000,000 words) from New York Times and USA Today . The study adopts a descriptive and functional approach, analyzing a large set of features relating to the ideational, processing, textual, and personal functions of language (use features) and aesthetic function of language (usage features). This approach involves two types of stylistic comparison: across newspaper types (quality vs. popular) and newspaper text types (sub-registers of news reportage vs. editorials).; The results of the study show variability across the two newspapers and their sub-registers in both use and usage features. Regarding use features, the results show that the prestige daily NYT consistently exceeds the popular paper USA Today in all measures of lexical specificity, such as average word length, average length of sentences, lexical density, and type token ratio. The findings also show a higher frequency of overall passives in NYT. The popular newspaper USA Today exceeds NYT in the use of personal pronouns, stance adverbials, and speech act verbs, with a complex pattern of variation across the different sub-registers.; As for usage features, with the exception of sentence-initial coordinators, the prestige NYT seems to be more conservative than the popular USA Today in the occurrence of dispreferred usages (split infinitive, clause-final prepositions, functional shift, modifying absolute adjective, sentence adverbial "hopefully" and epicene "they"). In both newspapers, the sub-registers of hard news (event-focused and information-focused sections) are more conservative than editorials and entertainment sections.; The overall findings indicate that newspapers producing quality journalism exhibit higher overall levels of style difficulty and observance of "proper" usage. The findings also underline the importance of considering newspaper language as a range of registers or sub-registers. Only in this way, can we account for the complexity of variation of newspaper language and allow for the overlap of its style with other varieties of English.