BOOK REVIEW
Jan Chovanec.
Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News: From Canonical Headlines to online
news texts. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014. Pp. i-xvi, 1-294. ISBN
978 902725658 4, 9789027269324.
Reviewed by Maria-Crina Herțeg 
, 1 Decembrie 1918 University
of Alba Iulia
The book authored by Jan Chovanec brings into
focus the analysis of the language used in the media. Chovanec (2014) tries to
capture the shift of grammatical tenses in newspapers and the way in which
temporality is encoded in news texts.
The book authored by Jan
Chovanec is divided into three parts and comprises eleven chapters. Each of the
three parts tries to address a different research question. In the first part
of the book Chovanec (2014) is preoccupied with the way temporal deixis
operates in traditional texts and the specificities of temporal anchorage in
online news articles.
In the preface the author
explains the motivation behind the choice of the subject and briefly describes
the contents of the book, its aim, the history of the book which originates in
the author’s doctoral dissertation defended at Masaryk University in Brno in
2001 and which however remained unpublished.
The aim of the book is to
reveal the operation of the textual rhetoric of traditional written media by
considering the relatively straightforward phenomenon of temporal deixis, the
way temporal anchorage of past-time events is encoded.
The starting point in the
interpretation of the conventional non-deictic present tense found in English
headlines as an interactive device. The interpretation of tense in headlines as
an interpersonal device is supported by considering the differences in how
temporal deixis is encoded in different segments of news stories.
References
Chovanec, J. (2014). Pragmatics
of Tense and Time in News: From Canonical Headlines to online news texts.
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
How
to cite this review: Herțeg,
M.-C. (2022). [Review of the book Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News: From
Canonical Headlines to online news texts, by J. Chovanec]. Journal of
Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 15(4), 193–200. https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2022.15.4.11
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