News as a Conversation. A Comparative Analysis of the Language of Online and Printed News in Italy

Abstract

Previous studies on newspaper language have already pointed out how the language of written news has undergone significant changes in the last two or three decades. The aim of this study is to move a step forward and to compare the use of selected linguistic features in online and in printed Italian news  . The main hypothesis is that Internet and communication technologies have introduced important transformations in the way news is written, organized and delivered, and that the consequences of these transformations are observable at all levels of linguistic analysis.