Comparing discourse construction in 17th-century news genres: A case study of murder reports

The contribution examines aspects of discourse construction in 17th-century crime reports. Four news genres are taken into account: news broadside ballads, occasional news pamphlets, newsbooks, and The London Gazette as an example of an early newspaper. The news genres are compared in terms of structure and lexis so as to highlight similarities and differences in their murder presentation and reporting. Frequent instances of discourse interrelatedness testify to a certain degree of continuity in terms of authorial intrusion, blending of factuality and sensationalism, and Puritan stance. At the same time, forms of discourse variation – especially from the second half of the century – highlight changes in the direction of objectivity, impersonalisation and brevity. The analysis shows how authorial commentaries and metadiscourse progressively withdraw from the murder account with a consequential foregrounding of factuality as the major ingredient of a high-quality report.