Newspaper editorials and New Englishes: A good match?

Newspapers and magazines have often been used as a source of data in corpus linguistics. In the case of English, corpus linguists have used them to study the ‘standard’ varieties of English (cf. for example Fries & Lehmann 2006 or Millar 2009), but also, more recently, the new, indigenised varieties of English (e.g. Schmied & Hudson-Ettle 1996, Mukherjee & Hoffmann 2006). Corpora designed to represent a wide cross-section of the language will also, typically, contain a section with samples from newspapers and/or magazines (cf. British National Corpus, International Corpus of English). Besides the pervasiveness of written media in people’s everyday life, and hence their obvious impact in linguistic terms, one reason for including this type of data is that usually they can be downloaded very easily from the newspapers’ or magazines’ websites, which makes it possible to constitute a large corpus in a short time. Using specialised tools such as GlossaNet (http://glossa.fltr.ucl.ac.be), it is even possible to automate the daily collection of newspaper articles according to specific criteria (e.g. language, country, newspaper sections, etc). Issues such as editorial policy or copy-editing, however, may make one wonder to what degree the language found in the press reflects the language of the man on the street. This question is all the more important for New Englishes, whose emerging features may not (yet) be recognised to such an extent as to make their way into newspapers or magazines. In this presentation, I will seek to determine the suitability of newspaper articles, written by professional journalists, to investigate indigenised varieties of English. My analysis will be based on a corpus of editorials and columns in Jamaican English, part of the MULT-ED (Multilingual Editorial) Corpus, and a comparable corpus of readers’ comments. The fact that the comments were written in reaction to the editorials and columns included in the MULT-ED Corpus results in similar contents and hence a very high degree of comparability between the two corpora. The phenomenon that will be investigated is that of phrasal verbs, which have been shown to behave differently according to register (Moon 1997: 46), native vs non-native speakers (Siyanova & Schmitt 2007), etc. A comparative analysis of phrasal verbs in the journalists’ editorials/columns and in the readers’ comments will allow us to identify possible differences between the two and thus judge the reliability of newspaper editorials to shed light on emerging features of New Englishes