Thinking about the news : thought presentation in early modern English news writing

Walker and McIntyre investigate the forms and functions of discourse presentation in a corpus of Early Modern English news reporting, concentrating particularly on thought presentation. They describe they manually annotated the corpus using discourse presentation categories and consider the methodological issues associated with corpus annotation for categories that are function rather than form-based. They explain how they ensured the replicability of their annotation using principles that are likely to be valuable for anyone manually annotating a corpus for function-based categories. They compare quantitative findings from their corpus against a similarly annotated corpus of present day English news journalism in order to determine diachronic changes in discourse presentation frequencies. They then offer a qualitative analysis of the function of thought presentation in Early Modern English news.