Monika Bednarek (born 1977) is a German-born Australian

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

. She is a professor in linguistics at the

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...

and director of the Sydney Corpus Lab. She is one of the co-developers of Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA), which is a framework for analyzing how events are constructed as newsworthy through language and images. Her work ranges across various linguistic sub-disciplines, including

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by way of a text corpus (plural ''corpora''). Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a giv ...

, media linguistics,

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies unde ...

discourse analysis Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, spoken, or sign language, including any significant semiotic event. The objects of discourse analysis (discourse, writing, conversation, communicative sy ...

stylistics Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the study and interpretation of texts of all types, but particularly literary texts, and spoken language with regard to their linguistic and tonal style, where style is the particular variety of l ...

, and

applied linguistics Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, psychology, Communication stu ...

. She was elected a Fellow of the

Australian Academy of the Humanities The Australian Academy of the Humanities was established by Royal Charter in 1969 to advance scholarship and public interest in the humanities in Australia. It operates as an independent not-for-profit organisation partly funded by the Australi ...

in 2024.

Biography

Bednarek was born and educated in southern

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. She received her

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in English Linguistics (

summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sout ...

) in 2005 from the

University of Augsburg The University of Augsburg () is a university located in the Universitätsviertel section of Augsburg, Germany. It was founded in 1970 and is organized in 8 Faculties. The University of Augsburg is a relatively young campus university with a ...

under the supervision of Wolfram Bublitz. She received her

Habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...

in English linguistics in 2008 from the same university, where she also held her first academic appointment. Since 2009 she has held a continuing position in Linguistics at the University of Sydney. From 2009 to 2015, Bednarek was book reviews editor of the SAGE journal Discourse and Communication. From 2017 to 2021, she was co-editor, along with Lachlan Mackenzie and Martin Hilpert, of the international journal Functions of Language (John Benjamins).

Contributions to linguistics

Much of Bednarek's research makes a contribution to corpus-based discourse analysis or corpus-assisted discourse studies. Key projects include the analysis of TV series (with a focus on dialogue), news discourse (news values analysis, shared news, and health news), the language of evaluation/emotion, and innovation in research methodologies in corpus linguistics.

Television dialogue

Bednarek's research on television dialogue has focused on US TV series, with more recent work extending this to Australian series. Contributions include the theorizing of televisual characterization, for example, the concept of 'expressive character identity', a new framework for analysing the functions of dialogue (FATS), and methodological innovation in taking a trinocular view of how language is used in television series, how such language is produced by screenwriters, and how it is consumed in transnational contexts. A new corpus of dialogue from 66 different TV series was compiled for this project. Her work on swear and taboo words in television dialogue has resulted in a novel operationalization and theorization of such words as well as a new taxonomy of relevant linguistic practices.

News discourse

Early corpus-assisted discourse analysis systematically compared the expression of opinion in British

broadsheet A broadsheet is the largest newspaper format and is characterized by long Vertical and horizontal, vertical pages, typically of in height. Other common newspaper formats include the smaller Berliner (format), Berliner and Tabloid (newspaper ...

and tabloid newspapers. In collaboration with Dr. Helen Caple, Bednarek later created a framework for the discursive analysis of news values, called DNVA. This approach uses corpus and discourse analysis to examine how news values are constructed through semiotic resources (language, image, etc.).

Evaluation, emotion, attitude

Bednarek has made contributions to the study of language and evaluation/emotion. Her 2006 book, ''Evaluation in Media Discourse,'' introduced a parameter-based framework of evaluation, while her 2008 book, ''Emotion Talk Across Corpora,'' developed a corpus linguistic approach to the analysis of emotion talk and explored this across British English registers. The book includes a chapter describing a local grammar of affect, evaluated by Susan Hunston as 'probably the most successful' version. Bednarek has also contributed to critiquing and developing research on appraisal, especially in relation to attitude and affect.

Key publications

* Bednarek, M. (2023) ''Language and Characterisation in Television Series: A Corpus-informed Approach to the Construction of Social Identity in the Media''. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. * Bednarek, M. (2019) ''Creating Dialogue for TV: Screenwriters Talk Television''. London/New York: Routledge. * Bednarek, M. (2018) ''Language and Television Series. A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Bednarek, M. and H. Caple (2017) ''The Discourse of News Values: How News Organisations Create Newsworthiness''. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. * Bednarek, M. and H. Caple (2012) ''News Discourse''. Continuum Discourse series (edited by Ken Hyland). London/New York: Continuum. * Bednarek, M. (2010) ''The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity''. London/New York: Continuum. * Bednarek, M. (2008) ''Emotion Talk across Corpora''. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. * Bednarek, M. (2006) ''Evaluation in Media Discourse. Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus''. London/New York: Continuum.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bednarek, Monika 1977 births Living people Linguists from Germany Linguists from Australia Academic journal editors Australian women linguists Women linguists Academic staff of the University of Sydney 21st-century Australian women writers 21st-century Australian writers University of Augsburg alumni 21st-century German women writers Linguists of English 21st-century German non-fiction writers Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities