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In this article we explore two of British crime fiction writer James Hadley Chase's novels in connection with Forster's [Aspects of the Novel] distinction between flat and round characters, later c...

This chapter provides a brief overview of what noun phrases in sentences consist of and how they can be analysed. This enables identification of naming choices for offenders and victims and thus their labelling processes, applying Critical Stylistics either on its own or accompanied by a corpus linguistic approach. Some basic corpus linguistic tools are introduced from the freely available software package AntConc. The model of grammar used in this book is called SPOC (subject, predicate, object, complement).

This chapter provides an introduction to hypothesising by means of modality (expressing a stance towards a proposition), the construction of hypothetical worlds by means of negation and the presentation of other people’s speech as three further textual–conceptual functions of texts.

This chapter concludes the introduction of Critical Stylistics and its ten textual–conceptual functions by introducing the construction of a time–space envelope through deixis, the coordinates to anchor a text in relation to time, space and society. In the second part, an introduction to cognitive metaphor theory based on the two-domain approach is presented as an additional tool relevant to the constructions of offenders and victims.

This chapter introduces four more textual–conceptual functions of Critical Stylistics. They are concerned with the construction of opposition, the suggestion of completeness in enumerations, how information is prioritised in sentences and, finally, about implied and assumed meaning.

This chapter introduces analytical tools for the predicator in a sentence to be used either manually or assisted by AntConc, the latter to reveal a representative picture in larger amounts of texts. It sheds light on how the construction of processes, events or states relates to the construction of crime and its main participants.

This chapter introduces the topic of this book and places it at the intersection of linguistics, criminology and media studies. The terms ‘media’, ‘news’ and ‘news sources’ as well as the profession of journalists are explained to set apart producer from textual meaning. In addition, textual meaning is introduced and the notion of stylistic choices as key to its analysis. The examples presented in this book stem from The Guardian. Thus, some information about this newspaper and its place in the newspaper market are provided.

Crime, especially when it includes violence against a person, has an enduring fascination (Jewkes 2004) and is presented in all sorts of media, ranging from crime fiction in novels to reports on crime that have taken place in reality. The media institutionalise the experience of crime and thus ‘increase the salience of crime in everyday life’ (Garland 2001:158). They provide a continuous flow of new crime reports for information and entertainment (Williams 1998) because consumers continually require new and spectacular stories about crime and criminals (Jewkes 2009).