This book offers a systematic introduction to the linguistic analysis of newspaper reports on crime. The author demonstrates how the linguistic analysis of newspaper texts helps to gain insight into the construction of offenders and victims in those texts and links the findings to criminological frameworks. Tabbert employs Critical Stylistics to explore the description of participants, the presentation of speech as well as actions, states or events, and other linguistic devices employed by journalists to present a particular image of an offender or a victim in the press. This book shows the fruitfulness of an interdisciplinary approach to reveal predominant discourse on crime in society and will be of great interest to researchers in linguistics, criminology and media studies.

Ulrike Tabbert is a Senior Public Prosecutor (Oberamtsanwältin) at a German prosecution office as well as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from Huddersfield and is the author of Crime and Corpus: The linguistic representation of crime in the press (2015).