TY - JOUR

T1 - Empowerment and disempowerment in the Glencairn Uprising: A corpus-based critical analysis of Early Modern English news discourse.

AU - Prentice, Sheryl

AU - Hardie, Andrew

PY - 2009

Y1 - 2009

N2 - The Glencairn Uprising (1653–1654) was a military rebellion by Scottish Highlanders under the leadership of William, Earl of Glencairn, against the English government of Oliver Cromwell. This paper investigates the presentation of actors and groups on both sides of the Uprising — but most especially Glencairn himself — in the contemporary London press. The theoretical framework of the analysis is Critical Discourse Analysis (modelled especially on the approach of van Dijk 1991); however, a corpus-based methodology, and a partially-quantitative analysis, are employed. The documents in question — a corpus of newsbooks published in late 1653 and the first half of 1654 — are analysed by a process of assigning concordance lines extracted using a wide set of search terms to particular categories of discourse-semantic meaning. The newsbooks are shown to make use of greatly contrasting discourses in their representations of Glencairn and others, resulting in “discourses of empowerment and disempowerment” (the latter being associated secondarily with a “discourse of disunity”). By employing these discourses, the newsbook journalists discredit Glencairn and his associates, whilst crediting the English and their associates.

AB - The Glencairn Uprising (1653–1654) was a military rebellion by Scottish Highlanders under the leadership of William, Earl of Glencairn, against the English government of Oliver Cromwell. This paper investigates the presentation of actors and groups on both sides of the Uprising — but most especially Glencairn himself — in the contemporary London press. The theoretical framework of the analysis is Critical Discourse Analysis (modelled especially on the approach of van Dijk 1991); however, a corpus-based methodology, and a partially-quantitative analysis, are employed. The documents in question — a corpus of newsbooks published in late 1653 and the first half of 1654 — are analysed by a process of assigning concordance lines extracted using a wide set of search terms to particular categories of discourse-semantic meaning. The newsbooks are shown to make use of greatly contrasting discourses in their representations of Glencairn and others, resulting in “discourses of empowerment and disempowerment” (the latter being associated secondarily with a “discourse of disunity”). By employing these discourses, the newsbook journalists discredit Glencairn and his associates, whilst crediting the English and their associates.

KW - corpus linguistics

KW - critical discourse analysis

KW - Cromwell

KW - Glencairn

KW - journalism

KW - newsbooks

KW - seventeenth century

U2 - 10.1075/jhp.10.1.03pre

DO - 10.1075/jhp.10.1.03pre

M3 - Journal article

VL - 10

SP - 23

EP - 55

JO - Journal of Historical Pragmatics

JF - Journal of Historical Pragmatics

SN - 1566-5852

IS - 1

ER -