Editorials and Opinion Articles in the CorDis Corpus: A Transversal Study

The research in this chapter builds on previous work that has distinguished linguistic features of the discourse type opinion articles, frequently called ‘op-eds’, from other types in media discourse, such as editorials and newspaper reports. Starting from Biber’s lists of features involved in the ‘overt expression of persuasion’ (1988:195), Murphy and Morley (2006) documented characteristic features of op-eds in terms of the frequency of first and second personal pronouns, verbs indicating mental and verbal processes, and lexical density. In the present paper, by quantitative and qualitative means, the subcorpora of opinion articles and editorials (PapOp and PapEd) from the CorDis Corpus are compared and contrasted across two different parameters, popular papers versus quality papers, and British versus American papers, with the aim of making finer distinctions between the two discourse types. Three broad issues are approached. Firstly, aspects of spoken discourse such as interjections, vocatives, discourse markers, contracted forms, and first-person imperatives are sought and explored in the two discourse types; this section is a development of research by Murphy and Morley (2006) which reported that, from the point of lexical density, op-eds resemble spoken language more than editorials. Secondly, through an analysis of keywords and headlines, differences are observed across the two types of newspapers, quality and popular, and between American and British papers. Lastly, the phraseology of the two discourse types is examined through comparing clusters of 2, 3, or 4 words in the subcorpora.