What Does a Linguistic Gaze Bring to Periodical Research?

Periodicals have proved a privileged site for investigating pragmatic features of language in context, sociolinguistic phenomena, and verbal-visual interaction. This article presents a metatheoretical exploration of linguistic methods and describes how these can significantly enrich the field of periodical studies. It surveys the main linguistic theories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries— including Text and Computational Linguistics, Systemic Functional Grammar, Appraisal Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Multimodal Linguistics— and offers a critical discussion of their effectiveness and limitations in periodical research. Conversely, it highlights the additional value that a periodical studies perspective brings to linguistics, emphasizing the importance of newspapers, magazines, and journals in capturing the dynamic interplay between language, society, and individual identity. To address the governing questions of this special issue, it investigates the convergence between linguistics and periodical studies, focusing on their common interest in understanding the social and individual creation of meaning through discursive practices and multimodality. Through a theoretical overview and a significant case study—the comparative analysis of two historical translators’ journals—this article demonstrates how integrating linguistic theories with periodical studies can provide a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of meaning-making in cultural contexts.