Yes! One of my tutors, and a friend who is doing a PhD both work in this field. Hope this is useful: http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/498/ Article is titled: A corpus-based stylistic study of newspaper English. 

Wow, appreciate it Elizabeth! Thanks so much for the sharing:)

Hello, Elizabeth, thank you for the valuable information. 

Several examples which may help:

Use of metaphor in British business journo: http://asp.revues.org/3718?lang=en

Chinese and American sports news headlines compared: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijel/article/viewFile/30683/18115

The following study is about news values, but still may be helpful: Amanda Potts, Monika Bednarek, Helen Caple "A corpus linguistic study of the construction of newsworthiness in the reporting on Hurricane Katrina" in Discourse & Communication (Sage). I believe this article is free access.

You may also want to take a look at a recent work by Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bos and  Udo Fries "News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis", Cambridge, 2012.

Thanks! Excellent references.

Check here: http://hdl.handle.net/1893/11208 for my work on media representation at the University of Stirling. One of the chapters deals with corpus. Hope it helps?

thanks appreciate it!

Sean Phelan did a corpus-based analysis of newspaper articles about the New Zealand government's planned theft from Maori of the foreshore and seabed around the coast; very interesting results - see Academia.edu

https://www.academia.edu/1857514/The_radical_the_activist_and_the_hegemonic_newspaper_articulation_of_the_Aotearoa_New_Zealand_Foreshore_and_Seabed_Conflict

Thanks for the sharing Jenny, the Genre-based break down (Table 4) helps to provide solid background of the data.

Corpus study of content words seem to be easier found in the literature review.

In addition to Elizabeth's sharing of a  dissertation topic specifically researching syntax of the news language, a few more relevant studies were found online:

Albakry, M. A. (2005) Style in American Newspaper Language: Use and Usage, Disseration, Northern Arizona University, the United States.

McIntyre, B. T. (1996) English news writing: A guide for journalists who use English as a second language, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.

Pattanaporn, P. (2011) A comparative study of post-modifiers used in business news in leading newspapers in Thailand, USA and UK, Dissertation, University of Thai Chamber of Commerce.

There must be more research somewhere on such topics.

On a small scale, I have been looking into the use of attributive verbs, modal verbs, "strong" verbs (of short syllables)  in the news language.

Perhaps the use of tense in online news reporting is another area to be explored?

Thanks for all the generous sharing. Let's keep the disussion going...

one more study on attribution in news writing:

VOLUMEN MONOGRÁFICO (2013), 51-69

THE EMERGENCE OF EXTERNAL SOURCES OF ATTRIBUTION

IN A PILOT STUDY OF SCIENCE POPULARIZATIONS FROM

THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER

BLANCA GARCÍA RIAZA*

IZASKUN ELORZA

Universidad de Salamanca

ABSTRACT. The discourse of news media in English has traditionally been an attractive and fruitful source of information for discourse analysts and corpus linguists.However, studies on science popularizations as a text type of newspaper discourse are still scarce. What we know often comes from contrastive analyses between scientific texts (typically academic research articles) and science popularizations from newspapers (Hyland 2010; Myers 1990, 1994; Skorczynska 2001), and yet popularizations present features typically associated to newspaper discourse. The research presented here is a pilot study on how external sources of attribution are introduced in the text in popularizations from The Guardian. The presence of external sources of attribution has been scrutinized in relation to the thematisation of elements from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday 1985; Thompson 2004). The identification of patterns of how attribution is introduced in this text type has provided insight of how information is constructed in science popularizations and the crucial role of attribution sources.

KEY WORDS. Thematisation, science popularisations, attribution sources.

Facchinetti (2015) English and Journalism in the 21st Century

http://www.ordinegiornalisti.veneto.it/files/FORMAZIONE/MATERIALI_FORMAZIONE/FACCHINETTI_ENGLISH_JOURNALISM_21st_CENTURY.pdf

Here are some possibilities:

Visit: ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) -- http://cass.lancs.ac.uk/?tag=journalism

Also look here:

Alan Partington. A corpus-based investigation into the use of metaphor in British business journalism. In French-lang journal: http://asp.revues.org/3718

More on business news: Anatol Stefanowitsch, Stefan Thomas Gries "Corpus-based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy". Walter de Gruyter, 2007.

Amanda Potts, et.al. How can computer-based methods help researchers to investigate news values in large datasets? A corpus linguistic study of the construction of newsworthiness in the reporting on Hurricane Katrina. In Discourse & Communication: http://dcm.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/21/1750481314568548.refs

Monika Bednarek, Helen Caple. "News Discourse". Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012.

Arcimaviciene, Liudmila. Morality models through metaphors in media political discourse. A cross-linguistic perspective. Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010.

That should You get started. Hope it helps.

Romas

Appreciate it, Romas!

Will look into them, very useful references.

Dora