Australian newspapers in recent years have increased significantly the column space devoted to obituaries. The Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Age, the West Australian, the Herald Sun, the Canberra Times, the Advertiser, and the Courier-Mail now publish them in dedicated sections, often allocating an entire page to the obituary art. Their popularity in Australia follows a pattern established during the 1980s in Britain and the United States. Australian practice has been influenced in particular by developments in British journalism, which has seen a phenomenon described by the Wall Street Journal as ‘an odd revival…the rebirth of long newspaper obituaries’.† In its first incarnation, the obituary can be traced to the newsbooks of England which appeared in the 1660s, during the Restoration. It flowered in the 18th century, in the first daily newspapers and magazines; it grew luxuriant, and sometimes ornate, in the 19th century; it became unfashionable and fell into some general neglect in the 20th. Then, with the appointment of reformist editors and, particularly in Britain, the publication of bigger newspapers by an industry no longer subjected to labour restraint, the obituary itself experienced restoration. Though the momentum of renewed practice has been of mutual rapidity on three continents, there are some significant variations in its application. The American product generally favours a style faithful to news-writing principles so far as timing and content are concerned and is frequently expansive when relating the details of surviving family and funeral arrangements. In Britain, the emphasis is more on creative composition and a recitation of anecdotes, with less of a sense of urgency about news value and a consequent accent on character sketch. Both models, in recent years, have displayed a propensity for explicit appraisal and an increasing willingness to publish obituaries of those who have undermined, rather than adorned, society. Newspapers in Australia, while adopting the obituary with apparent fervour, have found their delivery of the product restrained by a lack of resources. Obituary desks in this country are staffed by a solitary journalist-editor. This has resulted in a reliance, often to an unhealthy degree, on contributions by readers. The tone of this material, with its intimacy of address and excess in sentiment, sits uneasily when appearing on the same page as obituaries syndicated from overseas sources. Contemporary obituary publication in the United States has been subjected to some scholarly analysis in terms of gender balance, identification of cause of death, and the demographic mix of its subject selection. This thesis, by means of a six-month content analysis, addresses such questions for the first time in an Australian context. In addition, it examines issues of style, origin and authorship. It finds that cause of death is identified much less than is the case in American obituary practice, that women are significantly under-represented, and that editing is sometimes haphazard. Nevertheless, the accumulated body of evidence points resolutely to a remarkable reinvigoration of practice in Australia’s daily newspapers. The thesis, by discussing the views of specialists in the field of obituary publication, pursues mechanisms for sustaining the momentum and for improving the product.

Dans la présente étude, nous proposons une méthode pour observer les changements lexicaux (néologie et nécrologie) en anglais dans le domaine de l’informatique en diachronie courte. Comme l’informatique évolue rapidement, nous croyons qu’une approche en diachronie courte (sur une période de 10 ans) se prête bien à l’étude de la terminologie de ce domaine. Pour ce faire, nous avons construit un corpus anglais constitué d’articles de revues d’informatique grand public, PC Magazine et PC World, couvrant les années 2001 à 2010. Le corpus a été divisé en deux sous-corpus : 2001-2005 et 2006-2010. Nous avons choisi l'année 2006 comme pivot, car c’est depuis cette année-là que Facebook (le réseau social le plus populaire) est ouvert au public, et nous croyions que cela donnerait lieu à des changements rapides dans la terminologie de l’informatique. Pour chacune des deux revues, nous avons sélectionné un numéro par année de 2001 à 2010, pour un total d’environ 540 000 mots pour le sous-corpus de 2001 à 2005 et environ 390 000 mots pour le sous-corpus de 2006 à 2010. Chaque sous-corpus a été soumis à l’extracteur de termes TermoStat pour en extraire les candidats-termes nominaux, verbaux et adjectivaux. Nous avons procédé à trois groupes d’expérimentations, selon le corpus de référence utilisé. Dans le premier groupe d’expérimentations (Exp1), nous avons comparé chaque sous-corpus au corpus de référence par défaut de TermoStat pour l’anglais, un extrait du British National Corpus (BNC). Dans le deuxième groupe d’expérimentations (Exp2), nous avons comparé chacun des sous-corpus à l’ensemble du corpus informatique que nous avons créé. Dans le troisième groupe d’expérimentations (Exp3), nous avons comparé chacun des sous-corpus entre eux. Après avoir nettoyé les listes de candidats-termes ainsi obtenues pour ne retenir que les termes du domaine de l’informatique, et généré des données sur la variation de la fréquence et de la spécificité relative des termes entre les sous-corpus, nous avons procédé à la validation de la nouveauté et de l’obsolescence des premiers termes de chaque liste pour déterminer si la méthode proposée fonctionne mieux avec un type de changement lexical (nouveauté ou obsolescence), une partie du discours (termes nominaux, termes verbaux et termes adjectivaux) ou un groupe d’expérimentations. Les résultats de la validation montrent que la méthode semble mieux convenir à l’extraction des néologismes qu’à l’extraction des nécrologismes. De plus, nous avons obtenu de meilleurs résultats pour les termes nominaux et adjectivaux que pour les termes verbaux. Enfin, nous avons obtenu beaucoup plus de résultats avec l’Exp1 qu’avec l’Exp2 et l’Exp3. / In this study, we propose a method to observe lexical changes (neology and necrology) in English in the field of computer science in short-period diachrony. Since computer science evolves quickly, we believe that a short-period diachronic approach (over a period of 10 years) lends itself to studying the terminology of that field. For this purpose, we built a corpus in English with articles taken from computer science magazines for the general public, PC Magazine and PC World, covering the years 2001 to 2010. The corpus was divided into two subcorpora: 2001-2005 and 2006-2010. We chose year 2006 as a pivot, because Facebook (the most popular social network) has been open to the public since that year, and we believed that would cause quick changes in computer science terminology. For each of the magazines, we selected one issue per year from 2001 to 2010, for a total of about 540,000 words for the 2001-2005 subcorpus and about 390,000 words for the 2006-2010 subcorpus. Each subcorpus was submitted to term extractor TermoStat to extract nominal, verbal and adjectival term candidates. We proceeded to three experiment groups, according to the reference corpus used. In the first experiment group (Exp1), we compared each subcorpus to the default reference corpus in TermoStat for English, a British National Corpus (BNC) extract. In the second experiment group (Exp2), we compared each subcorpus to the whole computer science corpus we created. In the third experiment group (Exp3), we compared the two subcorpora with each other. After cleaning up the term candidates lists thus obtained to retain only the terms in the field of computer science, and generating data about relative frequency and relative specificity of the terms between subcorpora, we proceeded to the validation of novelty and obsolescence of the first terms of each list to determine whether the proposed method works better with a particular type of lexical change (novelty or obsolescence), part of speech (nominal, verbal or adjectival term), or experiment group. The validation results show that the method seems to work better with neology extraction than with necrology extraction. Also, we had better results with nominal and adjectival terms than with verbal terms. Finally, we had much more results with Exp1 than with Exp2 and Exp3.