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Sociocultural Dimensions of Lexis and Text in the History of English
Edited by Peter Petré, Hubert Cuyckens and Frauke D'hoedt
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 343] 2018
► pp. 41–60

Chapter 2
News and relations

Highlighted textual labels in the titles of early modern news pamphlets

This paper is a pragma-philological examination of the textual labels and visual features in the titles and title pages of 53 early modern sensationalist news pamphlets. The analysis shows that certain textual labels are favored over others, that textual labels were not highlighted until the 1640s, and that before that time the overall visual layout of the title page was a more important genre marker than textual labels. These developments in the conventionalization of textual labels can be tied in with increasing literacy and access to printed texts of the unlearned masses that were the primary readership of these pamphlets.

Keywords: historical linguistics, pragmatics, pragma-philology, English, news pamphlets, genre, textual labels, titles, illustrations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous linguistic observations on textual labels in Early Modern English pamphlets
  • 3.Materials and methods
  • 4.Results and analysis
    • 4.1Textual labels
    • 4.2Visual highlighting
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes>
  • References
Published online: 4 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.343.02suh
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2020. Chapter 2. On the dynamic interaction between peritext and epitext. In The Dynamics of Text and Framing Phenomena [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 317], ► pp. 33 ff. DOI logo

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