News from the future: A corpus linguistic analysis of future-oriented,unreal and counterfactual news discourse

Abstract

This article presents a corpus linguistic analysis of the development in future-oriented political journalism in four Danish newspapers in the period 1997–2013 (N = 2954 full articles = 1,553,038 word tokens). Keyword analysis and concordance analysis are applied within a framework of grammatical-semantic theory of tense and modal verbs and semantic-pragmatic theory of time meaning, modality and speech acts. The results suggest, unexpectedly, that the newspapers – and news reports in particular – seem to have become less future-oriented in the period. At the same time, however, the articles – and particularly news commentary, in itself increasing – might have become slightly more speculative. Thus, the journalists themselves have become the main source of ‘guessing’, that is, predicting and speculating, with the keywords vil (will) and ville (would), including unreal and counterfactual speculations in the past tenses.

Keywords

Concordance analysis corpus linguistics counterfactual journalism Danish newspapers future-oriented journalism guessing keyword analysis political journalism predicting speculating speech acts unreal journalism

Introduction

Time is a defining characteristic of journalism’s brief history. From once being about the – often quite distant – past, journalism embraces the now with live media, and has, in a time of uncertainty (Ellis, 2000), eventually turned to the future (Jaworski et al., 2003; Neiger, 2007). This article is about future-oriented journalism, ranging ‘from reporting on planned events to discussing consequences, expectations, and agendas’ (Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger, 2014: 7).

Viewed conceptually, future-oriented journalism is a rather peculiar phenomenon, almost a contradiction: it does not report about recent or ongoing events in the past or present. Rather, the future is fundamentally unknown, thus speculating about it can generate suspense (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013: 106). The literature suggests that future-oriented news has at least two overall societal functions: to interpretatively premediate, by ‘proliferating multiple remediations of the future’ (Grusin, 2010: 4), and, more proactively, to serve as society’s prospective memory of what collectively needs to be done (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013).

Future-oriented journalism is, hence, a part of larger trends. Scholars have stressed that, over a wide span of time, journalism has become less event-centred and more analytical, interpretive and contextual (Fink and Schudson, 2014; Salgado and Strömbäck, 2012; Schudson, 1982). Barnhurst (2011, 2013), for instance, has found that American newspapers – and in the 2000s online news – increasingly more often refer to time periods, including the future (Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997). Other studies have shown that contemporary journalism depends on uncertainty and that journalists often rely on prediction and speculation about the future in order to create ongoing news. Time is manipulated to make the future event seem more imminent, and the boundary between the present and the future is fading (Ellis, 2000; Jaworski and Fitzgerald, 2008; Jaworski et al., 2003; Neiger, 2007).

This study contributes to these vital lines of research with a grammatically founded approach to future-oriented journalism – which has been remarkably absent from many of the previous studies. For instance, Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger (2014) even instruct their coders ‘not to refer to the grammatical tense of the story but rather to the substantive one’ (p. 9). But such an approach might preclude us from valuable insight into the how of future-oriented journalism: How has it changed? Where does it typically occur? Who is involved? As I am interested in the level of uncertainty in future-oriented journalism, I will particularly pay attention to sources that are ‘guessing’, that is, predicting and speculating, about the future (Hansen and Blom, 2014). In sum, the research questions (RQs) for this study are as follows:

How has the frequency of future-orientation changed in Danish newspaper journalism over the period 1997–2013?

What subgenre of journalism (report vs commentary) is particularly future-oriented?

What kinds of journalists and sources ‘guess’ (predict and speculate) most frequently about the future?

Although the study is not hypothesis-driven, particular results are expected, based on previous research. As for RQ1, a rise in future-orientation over time is expected (cf. e.g. Barnhurst, 2013). As for RQ2, commentaries are expected to be more future-oriented than reports (Barnhurst, 2013). And with regard to RQ3, the journalists themselves and experts – and the increasingly more blurry source roles in-between – are expected to, increasingly, guess about the future (see e.g. Kroon Lundell and Ekström, 2013).

Integrating quantitative discourse analysis of a large data set with qualitative discourse analysis of patterns and cases, the corpus linguistic approach (Baker, 2006; Bednarek, 2006, 2012; Hunston, 2002) taken here is a perhaps needed supplement to the many content analyses cited above.

Corpus design

Four newspapers

The study conducts a longitudinal and comparative study, analysing future-oriented news in four Danish newspapers. Although television and the Internet are now more primary forms of news consumption (Nielsen and Schrøder, 2013: 21), daily newspapers are still – at least in Denmark – generating the vast majority of news that the other media cite or copy (Lund and Willig, 2009: 10).

In order to construct a representative sample, the two most read ‘broadsheet’ newspapers, Politiken and Jyllands-Posten, and the two most read ‘tabloid’ newspapers, Ekstra-Bladet and BT, are analysed.¹ The distinction is not based on the format of the newspapers, but rather on their values and content. As such, the broadsheets are traditional omnibus papers emphasising objectivity, fairness and so on, whereas the tabloids emphasise sensational stories that are ‘unexpected, dramatic, or appeal to readers’ curiosity’ (Skovsgaard, 2014: 202).

Twelve constructed weeks from two time periods

In order to diachronically track variations in future-oriented news, two time periods have been selected, evolving around the 1998 and 2011 Danish parliamentary elections, respectively. Since elections are expected to raise the future-orientation of news (When will the Prime Minister call the election?² Who will win? etc.), these two years have been chosen as focal points in addition to the year before the elections (1997 and 2010) and two years after (2000 and 2013), the latter to avoid 1999, presumably an unusually ‘speculative year’, due to the media panic about whether various IT systems would collapse at the turn of the millennium. The articles from 2010 to 2013 are the study’s node corpus, ‘i.e. the corpus that is of interest’ (Bednarek, 2012: 207), and the articles from 1997 to 2000 make up the reference corpus, ‘i.e. the corpus that works as a standard of comparison, baseline or norm’ (Bednarek, 2012). These two main corpora will be termed as the 2010s corpus and the 1990s corpus.

Across the six years, 12 weeks have been constructed, two from each year. Constructed week sampling has been stated to be more efficient than random or consecutive day sampling (Hester and Dougall, 2007: 819–820), its goal being ‘to create maximum sampling efficiency while controlling for cyclical biases (e.g. weekly news patterns)’ (Luke et al., 2011: 78). Although news cycles are immensely influenced – and thus ‘interrupted’ – by substantial events, carefully and uniformly constructed weeks should be able to avoid the most obvious biases. For the sample of this study, the days before the parliamentary elections have been points of departure from which rolling weeks have been selected throughout the two years, one day for each month (also rolling through the month with similar distances to the data collection points), although two days for July (presumably ‘slow’ due to parliamentary summer break) and two days for November (presumably ‘busy’ since the Danish parliament reopens after summer break the first Tuesday of October). The same pattern has been applied to the remaining four years, avoiding major holidays, 1 May celebration and so on (Bell, 1991: 22; see the overview of data collection points in Table 1).

Table 1.

Data collection points.

	1997	1998	2000	2010	2011	2013
Monday medio January	13 Jan	12 Jan	17 Jan	11 Jan	10 Jan	14 Jan
Saturday ultimo February	1 March	28 Feb	26 Feb	27 Feb	26 Feb	23 Feb
Tuesday medio March	11 March	10 March	7 March	9 March	15 March	5 March
Sunday primo April	6 April	5 April	2 April	11 April	3 April	7 April
Wednesday primo May	7 May	6 May	10 May	5 May	11 May	8 May
Thursday medio June	19 June	18 June	15 June	17 June	16 June	20 June
Sunday primo July	6 July	5 July	2 July	4 July	3 July	7 July
Tuesday ultimo July	29 July	28 July	25 July	27 July	26 July	30 July
Thursday medio August	7 Aug	13 Aug	10 Aug	12 Aug	1 Aug	8 Aug
Wednesday medio September	17 Sep	16 Sep	13 Sep	15 Sep	14 Sep	18 Sep
Monday ultimo October	20 Oct	19 Oct	23 Oct	18 Oct	24 Oct	21 Oct
Friday primo November	7 Nov	6 Nov	3 Nov	5 Nov	4 Nov	1 Nov
Saturday ultimo November	29 Nov	28 Nov	25 Nov	27 Nov	26 Nov	30 Nov
Friday medio December	19 Dec	18 Dec	15 Dec	17 Dec	16 Dec	20 Dec

Boldfaced text represent days before parliamentary elections.

Search engine and search string

The study focuses on political journalism, broadly conceptualised, and is thus not representative of all kinds of journalism. This limitation is partly based on practical considerations: the corpus size is more manageable and the sub-corpora more comparable when focusing on a topic and partly on essentiality: dramatic changes in political journalism are likely to have substantial consequences for politics and society. In this regard, political journalism might be viewed as a particular changeable form of news, that is, political stories have been found to be ‘the most complex temporally, referring the most to the past and the future’ (Barnhurst, 2013: 12).

The Danish text database Infomedia was used to find articles by means of thematic keywords and a Boolean search string including truncation: *folketing* (Folketinget is the name of the Danish parliament) OR *politik* (politics/policy) OR *politisk* (political) BUT NOT politiken* (the name of one of the four newspapers). All articles were then manually checked, downloaded, tagged and named by the author. Obvious typos resulting from Infomedia’s text processing were corrected.

Included in the sample were all full articles³ about or evolving around Danish national political news, both hard and soft. Thus, excluded were international and local politics. Naturally, these distinctions are not always clear-cut. For instance, decisions made in the European Union (EU) are likely to have consequences for – or are consequences of – Danish politics, but these would have to be explicitly mentioned to be included. Likewise, news from the other countries in the Danish Commonwealth (the Faroe Islands and Greenland) was only included if it was framed in a Danish context and/or if it explicitly mentioned Danish politicians or institutions. Generally, the inclusion/exclusion of articles was given through the thematic keywords and/or the framing, that is, headline(s) and lead. In cases of doubt, the entire articles were read.

Since the study focuses on journalistic discourse, only articles written by journalists or affiliates of the newspaper – that is, correspondents, reporters or editors (Montgomery, 2008: 261) – were included.⁴ This means, for instance, that letters to the editor were excluded.⁵ The category of affiliate can be murky, the decisive point here being whether the journalist or commentator writes in the same column/section, and is assigned a title and the newspaper’s email-address/label instead of, for instance, a private address. It should be noted that affiliates do not necessarily share the opinions of the newspaper. Rather, they have been assigned a – often even physical and recurrent – space in the paper which clearly distinguishes them from ‘ordinary people’ who ‘happen’ to contribute to the debate.

The articles were categorised into two categories: report and commentary (White, 1997), although the distinction sometimes proved hard to make, especially in the most recent articles from the tabloids. The decisive point was whether the article was mainly quoting or paraphrasing other sources (: third person report), or the journalist/affiliate herself or himself was the main source (: first person commentary). In total, the sample adds up to a corpus of 2954 full articles (1,553,038 word tokens) as displayed in Table 2.

Table 2.

Selected full articles for corpus.

	1990s corpus						2010s corpus						Total
	1997		1998		2000		2010		2011		2013
	As	Ws	As	Ws	As	Ws	As	Ws	As	Ws	As	Ws	As	Ws
BT	70		72		57		66		102		85		452
		27,814		27,764		26,510		21,344		39,187		41,497		184,116
Ekstra-Bladet	87		82		70		96		85		105		525
		49,427		41,195		38,126		31,898		31,652		40,050		232,348
Jyllands-Posten	172		212		151		170		191		142		1038
		92,152		94,845		77,774		101,188		111,713		92,340		570,012
Politiken	148		194		145		127		198		127		939
		70,856		94,447		71,669		88,990		146,797		93,803		566,562
Sum articles	477		560		423		459		576		459		2954
Sum words		240,249		258,251		214,079		243,420		329,349		267,690		1,553,038

As: number of articles; Ws: number of words.

As shown, the dispersions of articles and words make the corpora comparable. The 1990s and the 2010s corpora are almost equally sized, and the dispersion of the four newspapers is reasonable. The two omnibus papers are fairly equal in size, as are the two tabloids. The omnibus sub-corpus (1,136,574 words), however, is almost three times the size of the tabloid sub-corpus (416,464 words). Comparing these two types of newspapers is not a main goal of this article, but the imbalance in corpus sizes will be addressed in the analysis as it might somewhat skew the generalisability of the findings.

The specialised corpus (Hunston, 2002: 14) used for this study is fairly small or medium-sized, allowing for a ‘familiarity with the wider socio-cultural dimension in which the discourse was created’ (Flowerdew, 2004: 16). Thus, ‘the quantitative [findings] revealed by corpus analysis can be balanced and complemented with qualitative’ (Koester, 2010: 67). This is a crucial point for this study since the future can be realised in various linguistic ways.

Corpus linguistic methods

Using WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott, 2012), two corpus linguistic methods were applied: keyword analysis and, subsequently, concordance analysis. A positive keyword can be defined as a word that occurs significantly more often in a node corpus when compared to a reference corpus (Baker, 2006: 125; Bednarek, 2012: 207; Scott and Tribble, 2006: 55). Accordingly, a negative keyword occurs significantly less often (Baker, 2006: 139; Hunston, 2002: 68). WordSmith ascribes the positive and negative keywords a keyness value calculated from the p value. The higher the keyness value, the more statistically significant is the occurrence of the word. For this study, the p value was set to 0.05 which is equal to a keyness value of 3.84 (Scott, 2012).

The purpose of the keyword analysis is to, inductively, investigate future-oriented keywords. In principle, several word classes can be of interest, but in particular verbs, adverbs, prepositions and nouns. In Danish, future is typically expressed with modal verbs and/or with verbs in the present tense and time adverbials (Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 119 ff.). It should be noted, then, that Danish not only allows morphological present with future meaning, it is in fact rather common – also more common than in English (Boye, 2001: 58; Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 122 ff.). In a morphological present tense utterance like Statsministeren mødes med den russiske præsident på onsdag (literally ‘The Prime Minister meets with the Russian President on Wednesday’), only the lexical time expression adverbial on Wednesday points to the future – but neither on nor Wednesday are in themselves future-oriented. In other words, mødes does not reveal whether it is present or future tense – whereas English (and often Danish) would often apply a future time auxiliary: will meet. Accordingly, not all discourse about the future will necessarily be captured by the keyword analysis. This might be a potential source of error since the keyword analysis only reveals significant differences in wording and thus holds a risk that no future-oriented keywords show up.

Keyword analysis: Findings

Applying the WordSmith software for the keyword analysis,⁶ 110 positive keywords and 61 negative keywords turn up. Among those, seven – all verbs – can be termed future-oriented in that they are very likely to be part of a future-oriented discourse (see Table 3) displaying keyness values and relative frequencies (RFs), that is, occurrences per 100,000 words.⁷

Table 3.

Future-oriented keywords: 2010s corpus versus 1990s corpus (by keyness).

Keyword	English	Keyness	RF 2010s corpus	RF 1990s corpus
ville	would	6.2	118.5	105.1
kommer	come/s	4.4	124.9	113.3
tror	‘believe/s’	4.2	52.5	45.2
kommende	coming	−6.2	30.2	37.6
blive	‘be’, ‘become’	−10.1	112.2	130.0
må	may/must	−18.8	119.0	144.3
vil	will	−40.7	458.1	530.0

RF: relative frequency.

An important positive keyword is the modal verb ville (would, infinitive/past), which – obviously – can be used as temporal past, but moreover often forms speculative assertives about the future in non-real past, typically in combination with a conditional clause (Hansen and Blom, 2014; Jensen, 2005: 58 f.). Moreover, the positive keyword kommer (come/s, present tense of komme) is highly likely to point to the future in Danish (Dahl, 2000: 320, 327). Finally, the verb tror (‘believe/s’ or ‘think/s’, present tense of tro) can point to the future when used as projection.

Thus, three positive keywords are likely to be part of a future-oriented news discourse. However, there are at least four future-oriented negative keywords, and with much stronger keyness. The modal verbs må (may/must⁸) and, not least, vil (will) are highly significant findings. In fact, vil is ‘the canonical future time marker in Danish’ (Boye, 2001: 38), the future time meaning being ‘the default interpretation’ (Boye, 2001), because it implements the periphrastic tenses of future and future perfect (Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 56 ff.). Modal verbs are not always temporal auxiliaries, and vil is also a non-epistemic full verb of volition. But even then, present tense vil always has ‘futurity as a constant secondary meaning’ (Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 120). Moreover, kommende (coming, present participle of komme) is a negative keyword, in a way outbalancing the present tense kommer noted earlier. Finally, the infinitive blive (‘be’/‘become’) is usually part of a future tense. As an auxiliary, it forms periphrastic passive with epistemic modals (Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 21, 76), and vil blive (will ‘be’) implements the prototypical passive future tense (Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 58).

Whereas only these seven verbs can be termed future-oriented, other keywords – including more word classes – refer to other time frames. Among the positive keywords are the adverb/adjective tidligere (‘former/ly’) and several verbs able to form present and (periphrastic) past tenses: er (‘am’/are/is), gør (‘do/es’), har (have/has), var (was/were), havde (had), haft (had) and været (‘been’). Among the negative keywords, a number of adverbs/adjectives can express the immediate present: nu (now), nye (new), samtidig (‘concurrent/ly’), allerede (already), først (first) and sidste (‘last’, ‘latest’, ‘recently’). These additional findings might suggest that the 1990s corpus was more about recent events, whereas the 2010s corpus is more oriented towards the (present and) past.

Thus, so far, the keyword analysis does not confirm the preliminary expectations. In fact, on the contrary, it seems that there was more future-oriented (and less past-oriented) discourse in the 1990s. Not least, the modal verbs vil and må are high-frequent negative keywords, indicating future-orientation.⁹

All modal verbs

Since modal verbs in general are often used with future time meaning (Boye, 2001: 59), log-likelihood (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html) was calculated for the following eight modal verbs in modern Danish (Jensen, 2005: 46): behøve (‘need’), burde (‘ought to’), gide (‘feel like’), kunne (can), måtte (may|must), skulle (shall), turde (dare) and ville (will). When treating all modal verbs (in the present and the past tense) as one token, the keyness is −10.6. Thus, there are significantly less modal verbs in the 2010s corpus, a tendency that is even stronger for the modal verbs in the morphological present tense (which is usually used for future time meaning) with a keyness of −22.5. For all modal verbs in the past tense (which is also often used for non-real time meaning, i.e. epistemic distance), however, there is a positive keyness of 5.4, meaning that these are more salient in the 2010s corpus.

These findings confirm the keyword analysis: the articles have likely become less future-oriented. Overall, however, the corpus might have become more speculative, due to the increase in modal verbs in temporal/non-real past tense. In order to study these trends more thoroughly, a qualitative analysis of the concordance lines with vil and ville is conducted in the ‘Concordance analysis: Findings’ section.

Tabloid versus broadsheet

In order to investigate potential distortion of the data, the seven future-oriented keywords are displayed with regard to the two main newspaper types, tabloid and broadsheet, in Table 4 (keyness value is ascribed if the main keyword is a keyword in these sub-corpora).

Table 4.

Future-oriented keywords in tabloid and broadsheet corpora (keyness if keyword in sub-corpora).

Keyword	English	Tabloids			Broadsheets
Keyword	English	Keyness	RF 2010s	RF 1990s	Keyness	RF 2010s	RF 1990s
ville	would	–	130.3	126.2	9.0	114.7	96.3
kommer	come/s	8.0	130.3	100.6	–	123.2	118.6
tror	‘believe/s’	–	61.3	64.0	9.8	49.6	37.3
kommende	coming	7.8	36.5	21.8	−20.3	28.2	44.2
blive	‘be’, ‘become’	–	116.2	127.1	−9.6	110.9	131.1
må	may/must	–	133.3	145.6	−18.9	114.4	143.7
vil	will	−8.9	380.3	439.2	−38.8	483.3	568.2

RF: relative frequency.

As shown, the overall increase in kommer is mainly due to the tabloids which also have the otherwise negative keyword kommende as a positive, although low-frequent, keyword. However, the strongest overall tendency – the decrease in vil and må – seems to be carried by the larger broadsheet sub-corpus. Thus, particularly the broadsheets have presumably become less future-oriented, whereas the tabloids have changed to a lesser extent.

Report versus commentary

The dispersion of articles in the two main subgenre categories, report and commentary, has changed over the period so that there is much more commentary in the newest corpus: 16.8% of the articles in the 1990s corpus is commentary, whereas in the 2010s corpus it is 24.3%. In Table 5, the future-oriented keywords and relative frequencies of these genre specific sub-corpora are displayed.

Table 5.

Future-oriented keywords: report and commentary corpora (by keyness).

2010s report versus 1990s report
Keyword	English	Keyness	RF 2010s report	RF 1990s report
ville	would	7.7	117.4	100.9
kommer	come/s	6.1	133.2	117.3
kommende	coming	−12.4	26.5	37.9
blive	‘be’, ‘become’	−13.5	106.8	129.7
må	may/must	−20.2	109.9	138.6
vil	will	−46.7	464.2	552.3
2010s commentary versus 1990s commentary
Keyword	English	Keyness	RF 2010s commentary	RF 1990s commentary
får	‘get/s’	6.6	119.2	89.7
skal	shall	6.5	443.3	385.2
tror	‘believe/s’	4.0	41.8	28.6

RF: relative frequency.

The report corpus has the same positive and negative future-oriented keywords as the main corpus (except for tror), all of them with higher keyness. Since there are four negative keywords with much higher keyness than the only two positive keywords, it might be suggested that particularly reports have become less future-oriented. For the commentary corpus, there are three positive future-oriented keywords (also verbs) and no negatives, suggesting that commentaries have become slightly more future-oriented.

Framework for qualitative analysis

The analysis so far has pointed to the modal verb vil* as particularly interesting for further investigation: ville (morphological infinitive = past) is a significant positive keyword with a raw frequency of 996 (2010s corpus) and 749 (1990s corpus), and vil (morphological present) is a highly significant negative keyword with a raw frequency of 3850 (2010s corpus) and 3777 (1990s corpus). Since this modal verb is a key auxiliary verb in constructing the grammatical tenses of future and future perfect (vil) and future of the past and future perfect of the past (ville), it calls for further, qualitative analysis using concordancing.

In the qualitative analyses of a randomly selected 10% of the concordance lines with vil and ville in both corpora, the following four categories are analysed: grammatical tense, time meaning, source and speech act (see the overview in Table 6). The four categories are briefly explained below Table 6.

Table 6.

Overview of framework for qualitative concordance analysis.

Category	Unit of analysis
Grammatical tense	Clause	Present
		Past
		Present perfect
		Past perfect
		Future
		Future perfect
		Future of the past
		Future perfect of the past
Time meaning	Utterance/co-text	Time: past (before)
		Time: present (now)
		Time: timeless present (‘always’)
		Time: future (after)
		Distance: non-realised past
		Distance: non-realised present
		Distance: ‘non-realised timeless present’
		Distance: conditional future
Source	Utterance/co-text	Accountable source
		Expert
		In-house journalist/affiliate
		out-of-house journalist/affiliate
		‘Ordinary person’
Speech act	Utterance/co-text + context	Assertive: ‘certain’
		Assertive: ‘guess’: prediction
		Assertive: ‘guess’: speculation
		Directive
		Commissive
		Expressive

Grammatical tense

In Danish linguistics, there is an ongoing discussion on whether non-volitional vil* is to be grasped as a pure time auxiliary (Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]; Hansen and Heltoft, 2011: 795 f.), or whether it is inherently epistemically modal (Boye, 2001; Jensen, 2005). This discussion will not be addressed here, but it will be assumed that tense can be implemented morphologically as well as syntactically (Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 2). Thus, eight grammatical tenses are enumerated: two pure, that is, morphologically coded tenses, and six relative, that is, periphrastic tenses (Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 55 f.; see Table 7). The tenses are formally expressed at the clause level, excluding co(n)text.

Table 7.

Eight prototypical tenses in Danish (cf. Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 55 f., 63).

		V(erb), inflections and auxiliaries	English (approximately)
Morphological (‘pure’) tenses	Present	V + -er	V + -s/Ø
Morphological (‘pure’) tenses	Past	V + -ede, -te	V + -(e)d
Periphrastic (relative) tenses	Present perfect	har/er + V + -(e)t	has/have + V + -(e)d
	Past perfect	havde/var + V + -(e)t	had + V + -(e)d
	Future	vil + V + -e	will + V
	Future perfect	vil + have/være + V -(e)t	will + have + V + -(e)d
	Future of the past	ville + V + -e	would + V
	Future perfect of the past	ville + have/være + V -(e)t	would + have + V + -(e)d

Time meaning

The tenses often have different time meaning in different contexts, however, a prime example being modal verbs in past tense used with future meaning. Thus, a fundamental distinction between grammatical (-semantic) tense and (semantic-) pragmatic time meaning has to be made, the latter taking the co-text into account. Within time meaning, I distinguish between actual time, that is, when vil* is in fact – unmarked – used temporally, and modal distance, that is, when vil* is used ‘not in a temporal but in an epistemic sense’ (Langacker, 1978: 869).

Thus, even the future can be unmarked in this sense, for example, When the election will be held on Thursday … (time), or marked, for example, If the election will be held on Thursday … (distance). For the latter, the term non-reality is adopted, meaning that ‘the speaker marks that the situation or event referred to cannot readily be regarded as real’ (Jensen, 2009: 75, my translation). Hence, for time meaning I employ the eight categories in Table 8, determined from the deictic zero-point of the utterance, often relying on a broader interpretation of the co-text.

Table 8.

Eight time meanings.

Time: temporality/unmarked	Past (before)
	Present (now)
	Timeless present (‘always’)
	Future (after)
Distance: non-reality/marked	Non-realised past
	Non-realised present
	‘Non-realised timeless present’
	Conditional future

Source

Largely based on Montgomery (2008), sources are classified into the following categories: accountable source – that is, ‘public figures in the sense that they hold institutional positions and by their official status are treated as “having some locus” on the matter at hand’ (Montgomery, 2008: 262), expert, in-house journalist, out-of-house journalist/affiliate and ‘ordinary person’.

Due to the high complexity of embedding in journalism, the notion of first person averral versus third person attribution (Bednarek, 2006: 60 f.; Sinclair, 1988) is implemented, the point being that in journalism, ‘the writer is responsible for all statements unless a statement is attributed to someone else’ (Bednarek, 2006: 60). Thus, the writing journalist might be responsible (: averral) or – in the case of quote or paraphrase – responsibility may be attributed to another source (: attribution).

Speech act

Finally, the main speech acts are coded into assertive, directive, commissive and expressive (Searle, 1979). Moreover, since this study is interested in the level of (un-)certainty in journalism, the assertive speech acts are subdivided into three categories: ‘certain’ assertives (when reporting, including statements about a certain future), predictions and speculations.

A speculation can be identified as a prediction that builds on a hypothetical condition, prototypically expressed in a conditional clause (If … then …¹⁰) which – due to the causal relation between conditional and main clause – often governs larger parts of the text (Hansen and Blom, 2014; Jensen, 2005: 63). Hence, an assertive can be certain in its illocutionary force (which is not to say that it is necessarily true, or even sound) or uncertain, that is, guessing (: predicting or speculating). Note that, with these definitions, assertives are not limited to the future; only predicting is necessarily future-oriented. Table 9 displays an overview of the speech acts.

Table 9.

Six speech acts, exemplified (cf. Hansen and Blom, 2014; Searle, 1979).

Speech act	Definition	Example
Assertive: ‘certain’	The speaker commits to the truth of the proposition	[Journalist:] Hele 57,1 pct. siger i målingen, at den kommunale grundskyld ikke vil påvirke deres stemme (Jyllands-Posten, 21 October 2013)
Assertive: ‘certain’	The speaker commits to the truth of the proposition	[Journalist:] ‘In the pole, 57.1% say that the local property tax will not affect their vote’
Assertive: ‘guess’: prediction	The speaker commits to the truth that [uncertain future event]	[Actor:] ‘[Om 30 år vil Danmark] være fuldgyldigt medlem af EU’ (BT, 7 April 2013)
Assertive: ‘guess’: prediction		[Actor:] ‘[In 30 years] Denmark will be a fully-fledged member of the EU’
Assertive: ‘guess’: speculation	The speaker commits to the truth that if [hypothetical scenario], then [specific result/event]	[Journalist:] ‘[H]ar republikken først vist sig i nabolandene, vil den også komme til Danmark’ (Jyllands-Posten, 11 April 2010)
Assertive: ‘guess’: speculation		[Journalist:] ‘If the neighbouring countries became republics, then it would also happen in Denmark’
Directive	The speaker incites the hearer to take a particular action	[Politician:] ‘Vi vil anbefale et ja, selv om det er en noget mager traktat’ (Jyllands-Posten, 19 June 1997)
Directive	The speaker incites the hearer to take a particular action	[Politician:] ‘We recommend a yes, although it is a somewhat meagre treaty’
Commissive	The speaker commits to a future course of action	[Politician:] ‘Vi vil gerne støtte kunst og kultur, der produceres i Danmark’ (Politiken, 14 September 2011)
Commissive	The speaker commits to a future course of action	[Politician:] ‘We will support art and culture crafted in Denmark’
Expressive	The speaker expresses attitudes and emotions towards the proposition	[Executive:] ‘Så vi håber, at fornuften vil sejre i denne sag’ (Jyllands-Posten, 16 December 2011)
Expressive		[Executive:] ‘So we hope that reason will prevail in this matter’

Concordance analysis: Findings

Tense, time and speech acts

The analysis confirms that vil is indeed used for future tense (93% in both corpora), and with future time meaning (1990s corpus: 86%; 2010s corpus: 83%). As these numbers suggest, the similarities are more striking than the differences. This is also the case for the speech acts involving vil across the two corpora (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Speech acts, vil-concordances: 1990s corpus versus 2010s corpus.

Guessing (predicting and speculating) comprises 37% of the 1990s corpus and 39% of the 2010s corpus with almost the same distribution between predictions and speculations. Thus, since vil is a negative keyword, its frequency has changed (dropped) over time, but its usage has remained similar. Likewise, for ville, the similarities between speech acts in the two corpora are more distinctive than the differences (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Speech acts, ville-concordances: 1990s corpus versus 2010s corpus.

Clearly, ville is not used for prediction (0% in both corpora), but quite often for speculation which comprises more than a third of the recorded speech acts (1990s corpus: 39%; 2010s corpus: 35%). Although the numbers here suggest a small decline in speculation, it should be noted that the percentage of ‘certain’ assertives has also declined and that other often future-oriented commissive and directive speech acts (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013: 106) have increased. Also, ville is a positive keyword, that is, in itself statistically more frequent.

More interesting for this study is to look at the time meaning where ville is used for past time meaning in 43% of the concordances in both corpora – which means that it, more often than not, is used for non-past time meaning, that is, modal distance.

Whereas ville is used with conditional future time meaning more often in the 1990s corpus (23%) compared to the 2010s corpus (16%), the opposite is true for ville with past non-real time meaning (1990s corpus: 15%; 2010s corpus: 23%). The latter typically occurs in speculations about unreal (hypothetical) scenarios – with the conditional clause in the past tense and the main clause in the future of the past tense (cf. Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 170 f.):¹¹

Excerpt 1

Hvis det kun var kvinder, der havde stemmeret, ville Socialdemokraterne, SF og Enhedslisten have absolut rødt flertal i Folketinget. (BT, 15 March 2011)

If solely women had the right to vote, then Socialdemokraterne, SF and Enhedslisten [parties] would have absolute red majority in Folketinget.

Or even counterfactual scenarios as in this speculation by an expert:

Excerpt 2

Hvis regeringen derimod havde været i stand til at lægge en dæmper på overophedningen, ville den nuværende stigning i ledigheden være blevet bremset på et lavere toppunkt end det niveau, den har kurs mod nu. (Jyllands-Posten, 11 January 2010)

If the government, on the other hand, had been capable of dampening the overheating, the current increase in the unemployment would have been curbed at a lower peak than the level it is heading towards now.

Here, the never-realised assumption is located in the concluded past (past perfect tense), and the main clause, hence, counterfactual (future perfect of the past tense, cf. grammatical irrealis; Davidsen-Nielsen, 2013 [1990]: 179, 185; Hansen and Heltoft, 2011: 684). Such realisations of ville must be considered highly speculative since unreal and, particularly, counterfactual speculations cannot, ipso facto, be tested for truth value.

Guessing sources

When crossing the results for ‘guessing’ (with both vil and ville) with its sources (see Figure 3), an interesting shift is revealed: while accountable sources are the most guessing in the 1990s corpus, journalists are the most guessing in the 2010s corpus, particularly due to a rise in guessing out-of-house journalists.

Figure 3.

Sources ‘guessing’ (predicting and speculating) with vil and ville: 1990s corpus versus 2010s corpus.

Guessing journalists appear in the framing of news stories, that is, reports. In the prediction below the clearly uncertain can – which is justified in the article – is manipulated into unmarked will in the headline:

Excerpt 3

[Headline:] Globalisering vil blive det næste store tema [Lead:] Globalisering kan blive det næste store økonomiske og politiske tema. (Jyllands-Posten, 11 May 2011)

[Headline:] Globalisation will be the next major theme [Lead:] Globalisation can be the next major economic and political theme.

More remarkably, the rise in guessing journalists is consistent with the increase in commentary previously noted; see this speculation from an in-house journalist in an article labelled Analysis:

Excerpt 4

Det er det spørgsmål, der for tiden bruges mest tid på i de politiske kandestøberier på Christiansborg, og Enhedslisten har det grundlæggende problem, at der ikke er ret mange, som tror på, at partiet tør, når/hvis det kommer til stykket. Der er heller ingen tvivl om, at det ville være en meget svær og politisk risikabel beslutning for Enhedslisten, der frygter, at de røde vælgere – trods alt – vil blive vrede over, at de vælter en S-ledet regering. (Jyllands-Posten, 8 May 2013)

That is the question that currently takes up most time in the political pot foundries at Christiansborg, and Enhedslisten [party] has the fundamental problem that there are not very many who believe that the party dares [to overthrow the government] when/if it comes to the crunch. Furthermore, there is no doubt that it would be a very difficult and politically risky decision for Enhedslisten, who fears that the red voters – after all – will be angry that they topple a social democratic government.

Notably, the journalist is aware that she is speculating (cf. the ‘meta-speculative’ metaphor ‘political pot foundries’). Moreover, the footing (Goffman, 1981) of the argument is rather loose due to the use of passive voice (‘takes up’), general ‘sources’ (‘not very many’, ‘the red voters’) and the elastic hedging (Montgomery, 2007: 125 f.) through the ‘when/if’ construction. When and if are not synonymous – in fact, when cannot mark non-reality (Jensen, 2005: 42) – and this discrepancy is connected to a peculiar incongruity: if is cohesively followed by would, and when by will and that (instead of, more congruently, would and if). In other words, what starts out as a highly speculative scenario (if + would) drifts into much higher certainty (when + will).

Such incongruities might be due to grammatical error, haste or the like. But it might also suggest that the asserters are not always sure themselves what modal distances apply to their assertives, or even that they are manipulating non-reality into reality to make the projected event seem more urgent (Excerpt 3) or dramatic (Excerpt 4), in both excerpts: more certain.

In this section, so far, I have only pointed out where the journalists are explicitly guessing with vil and ville. Moreover, they seem to increasingly more often design questions (directive speech acts) in a speculative manner:

Excerpt 5

Hvad ville en spareplan a la den græske betyde for vores dagligdag og økonomi? (Jyllands-Posten, 3 March 2011)

What would an austerity budget à la Greek mean to our [Danish] everyday lives and economy?

Here, the (implicit) condition makes up an unreal – highly hypothetical – scenario, inciting the interviewed expert to speculate. Thus, the doubling in guessing experts (see Figure 3) might not reflect that experts ‘per se’ have become more guessing, but rather that they more often are goaded into a speculative discourse through framing and question design.

A final tendency to be pointed out is that guesses from other journalists are cited, even when, for instance, a prediction from the past has turned out unfulfilled:

Excerpt 6

Det var da et fejljugement af dimensioner. Sådan er det jo, når man skriver om et øjebliksbillede af dansk politik, og tingene ændrer sig bagefter. Berlingskes Thomas Larsen om sin analyse af, at Fogh ville blive i dansk politik. (Politiken, 16 June 2011)

That was, admittedly, a misjudgement of immense dimensions. That’s the way it is when you write about a snapshot of Danish politics, and things change afterwards. Berlingske’s Thomas Larsen [commentator] on his analysis of that Fogh [politician] would stay in Danish politics.

Here, a commentator is commenting on his own prediction (‘Fogh will stay in Danish politics’) which is set to have happened in the past and to have been proven wrong in the deictic now (Fogh did not stay in Danish politics). The comment, originally in the newspaper Berlingske, is then quoted in Politiken in a sort of journalistic closed-loop system where even wrong guesses have the ability of generating ‘news’.

Conclusion

This study found that political news in Danish newspapers – broadsheets in particular – might have become less future-oriented over the 1997–2013 period, according to the significant decline in modal verbs in the present (future) tense, not least vil, the key future tense auxiliary in Danish. A cautious explanation for this unexpected trend might be that the live media deal increasingly more intensively with the future (Ellis, 2000; Jaworski and Fitzgerald, 2008; Montgomery, 2007), ‘leaving’ the newspapers with background and contextual journalism, primarily about the past. The exploration of such an explanation, however, would require comparative cross-media studies.¹²

Furthermore, the study showed that particularly news reports probably became less future-oriented, whereas news commentary – in itself increasing – became slightly more future-oriented. This finding is in line with other studies on the general rise in analytical and interpretive journalism, and a ‘growing assertiveness of reporters after 1968’ (Fink and Schudson, 2014: 8).

Finally, the study found that, as the articles in general became less future-oriented, they might have become slightly more speculative, as demonstrated by the positive keyness of modal verbs in the past (unreal) tense. Primarily journalists – in exchange for accountable sources – became more speculative with the keywords vil (will) and ville (would) in framing, questioning and commentary, often in rather opaque linguistic constructions lacking clear footing, hedging and even reality status. This tendency might be in accordance with studies showing that the speculative level rises when journalists themselves become the main source in news (e.g. Kroon Lundell and Ekström, 2013).

Methodologically, the article has contributed to the study of time in journalism by applying the corpus linguistic methods of keyword analysis and concordance analysis. These methods combined have clear advantages of, both quantitatively and qualitatively, analysing linguistic realisations of time through wording and grammar. However, they also have limitations. As mentioned, future time is not necessarily expressed explicitly with future tense auxiliaries in Danish (nor English), but often with morphologically present tense and time adverbials, not easily tracked in the keyword analysis. On the other hand, not least vil, the prototypical future marker in Danish showed up as a significant and high-frequent negative keyword, indicating a general difference (decline) in future-orientation between the two corpora.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Dr Monika Bednarek for competently guiding this work during my visiting research fellowship at The Department of Linguistics, The University of Sydney in 2015.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was kindly supported by The Carlsberg Foundation (grant number CF14-0396).

Notes

Author biography

Kenneth Reinecke Hansen is an Assistant Professor in linguistics at the Centre for Journalism, University of Southern Denmark, formerly a Senior Lecturer in Danish at the Institute for School and Education, Metropolitan University College Copenhagen. His current research interests include future-oriented journalism, phoric references of online journalism, dramaturgy of television journalism and the application of corpus linguistics in discourse analysis.

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