본문 바로가기
  • Home

A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Newspaper Editorial Titles

  • The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea
  • Abbr : 사회언어학
  • 2003, 11(1), pp.31-54
  • Publisher : The Sociolinguistic Society Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > Linguistics

Yong-Jin Kim 1

1숭실대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

Kim, Yong-Jin. 2003. A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Newspaper Editorial Titles. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 11(1). This paper examines newspaper editorial titles from a sociolinguistic perspective. From the period of 1979-1999, five maximally different years (1979, 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999) were selected to see how the use of editorial titles changed. These five years represent different administrations and different socio-political situations in Korea.For the study, the Chosun Ilbo was chosen as a representative newspaper of contemporary Korea. First, the ratio of domestic coverage was examined for these five periods to see how the newspaper gained freedom to speak about national affairs. Second, the ratio of political coverage was analyzed to see how the newspaper came to acquire freedom to talk about political situations of the nation. Third, the question as to how often the government became the target of editorials was addressed and how different presidents from different periods were referred to to see the power relations between the presidents and the press. And finally, the linguistic forms of the editorial titles were analyzed. It was found that while the noun phrase type has decreased dramatically, other linguistic forms, most notably the question forms, have come to be used more as these new forms seem to allow the editorial writers more powerful discourse frames. This study illustrates the validity of newspaper editorial titles as a legitimate object of a sociolinguistic inquiry. Editorial titles are found to reveal discourse frames that newspapers take in editorials.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.