newspapers, journals and magazines

[Mad-ox]

hi,

Who could tell me a site where I could find vocabulary or linguistic differences between newspapers, journals and magazines.


thank you beforehand
m.

[Tdol]

Try breakingnewsenglish.com

[Mad-ox]

I have not found anything. I still wait for your help.


have a nice day!

[Tdol]

What differences are you looking for? There is no straightforward list- a magazine dealing with politics will have a very different language content from a magazine dealing with cooking or pornography.

[Mad-ox]

I am looking for language differences. Such as: as far as i know magazines use informal language. Or in journals there is pasive use of language etc. Diction differences and resemblences! etc Or grammar use etc

[Mad-ox]

help!

[Mad-ox]

[BobK]

Originally Posted by Mad-ox

I am looking for language differences. Such as: as far as i know magazines use informal language. Or in journals there is pasive use of language etc. Diction differences and resemblences! etc Or grammar use etc

I don't think there's any such distinction between magazines in general and newspapers in general. All those media use all those devices, more in some than in others.

For example any English magazine may use the passive voice from time to time; but I'd expect to find it used more often in Newsweek than in Hello. Similarly, any English newspaper may use the passive voice from time to time; but I'd expect to find it used more often in The Timesthan in The Sun. (There's also variation within one publication: I'd expect longer words to be used in an editorial, say, than in the sports pages.) But no newspaper is known as - for example - "the one to read if you hate the passive voice".

That said, newspapers/magazines do have a recognizable style. If you showed me the sentence: "Check out this babe - she's really turning heads" I'd be able to tell you that it probably didn't come from The Times.

b

[BobK]

Another thought about sports pages; two thoughts, actually.

1 - although in general they use shorter words than you'd expect on - say - world news pages, there's one word that is very popular (in team games that involve tackling and a ball- football, hockey, and so on) - "dispossessed". This word has become very popular in the last few years, and most commentators will use it in the meaning "tackled and won the ball". The word has spread from this sporting context, so that football presenters use it in other contexts: when Desmond Lyman lost a regular footballing slot in favour of a chat show, he complained that he had been "disspossessed". (Of course, the word existed before, and his usage was quite standard, but it's normally a rather formal word, and he used it chiefly because his audience were used to it from its sporting context.)

2 - Football pundits are no reference source for good English, but I suspect the use of videotape has spawned a new sort of conditional (very odd, certainly non-standard, not to be used in non-sporting contexts). Here it is in its original context:

Pundit:

If we can rewind to just before the tackle... Yeah thats it - when Neville receives the ball. Right, can you freeze the action? OK - if he crosses it now, it's a certain goal.

What this means is "If he had crossed the ball then, it would have been a certain goal"; the use of the videotape means that he can dispense with the past perfect altogether, and it also means - as soon as he says "Freeze the action" - that he's talking about an imaginary world. So he can dispense with the modal as well.

b

[Mad-ox]