Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin participated in the IPrA Conference in Antwerp, 26-31 July.
Minna Nevala presented a poster on “Un/solidarity and mis/evaluation: The portrayal of victims and criminals in nineteenth-century newspapers”. She dealt with the terms from a socio-pragmatic perspective, drawing from Bednarek’s (2006; Bednarek & Caple 2012) evaluation model as well as Martin & White’s (2005) appraisal theory, and categorised the data according to the notions of intensity, solidarity, and objectivity. The purpose of her work was to describe what public descriptions existed of criminals and their victims in late nineteenth-century newspapers, and how the readers’ evaluation of the crimes was influenced and even manipulated by the use of person reference.
Minna Palander-Collin participated in a panel “Towards a diachrony of relational work: Factors behind sociopragmatic change in 18th and 19th century Europe”, organized by Annick Paternoster and Marcel Bax. Her presentation dealt with “Factors behind sociopragmatic change in 19th-century British newspaper advertisements”. Her talk explored change in the form and functions of person reference in product advertisements during the 19th century on the basis of a corpus of c. 500 advertisements sampled from two London-based papers The Times and the Morning Post. The aim was to understand observed linguistic practices in relation to several immediate and more abstract contexts including the advertisers and the readership of the newspapers, the genre of advertisements, the history of newspapers, as well as broader socio-economic factors and identities. These contexts are reconstructed on the basis of
integrationist social theory (Layder 1997).
Here’s her powerpoint presentation Palander-Collin IPRA2015_pres and handout IPrA Handout.