Newspaper discourse informalisation: a diachronic comparison from keywords

In this paper, I provide an overview of certain types of salient items found in the keyword lists of the SiBol 1993 and SiBol 2005 corpora with the objective of diachronic analysis of a particular text type, namely, that of British broadsheet newspapers. I analysed the keyword lists (see Partington, 2010: Section 2) in search of items that could be assigned to semantic sets, which could be glossed as hyperbole, vagueness and informal evaluation. The appearance of these sets in the keywords for 2005 seems to point to changes over time in newspaper prose style. The newspapers under consideration thus appear to have altered both in their function and in their relationship with their readership; and this is reflected in the salient lexis and its contexts of use. An increase in conversational and informal styles emerges, along with a notable increase in a particular kind of evaluative and promotional language as a result of a proportional increase in soft news, supplements and reviews.