First circular: June 2013

CHINED 4 in Helsinki, Finland

5-7 June, 2014

News discourse from Early Modern English to the twentieth century

We are pleased to announce the Fourth International Conference on Historical News Discourse (CHINED IV) to be held at the University of Helsinki, 5-7 June, 2014. The previous conferences of the series were held in Florence (2004), Zurich (2007), and Rostock (2012).

We invite presentations dealing with news discourse from the Early Modern English Period to the early decades of the 20th century. Abstracts of 300 words should be sent to chined-iv@helsinki.fi by 1 December 2013.

Plenary speakers:

• Prof. Martin Conboy (University of Sheffield, UK)
• Prof. Roberta Facchinetti (University of Verona, Italy)
• Prof. Birte Bös (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

This conference series adopts a broad perspective on historical news discourse and contributions dealing with a variety of news publications are encouraged, including pamphlets as the first real mass media, corantos, and newspapers where texts range from news to editorials, advertisements and announcements, and various other genres.

The main theme of the conference will be texts targeted at various audiences in the centuries in focus. The beginnings of more popular styles have usually been placed in the eighteenth century, but styles of writing varied even earlier according to different target groups.

• How can we distinguish publications for different audiences?
• When did the styles diversify?
• What was the impact of changing and increasing readership on
  news discourse?

We would particularly like to invite pragmatic and sociolinguistic discourse studies, and new developments of corpus linguistic applications.