This monograph introduces the Evaluative Discourse Metaphor model, which argues that participants in public and semi-public online discourse (re)use evaluative metaphors to construct and maintain communities. We explore how such metaphors trigger others with similar forms, though not necessarily the same evaluative targets, generating discourse spaces unified by a shared evaluative ethos. The model draws on a discourse-based view of metaphor, Hallidayan metafunctions, Du Bois’s stance triangle, and insights from computer-mediated communication, with a focus on affordances and community-building. We define or redefine key concepts including single evaluative metaphors, metaphorical complexes, triggers, bondicons, and chains. Rather than departing from existing literature, we integrate it into a framework valuable to scholars in metaphor studies, digital ethnography, discourse analysis, and online communication.
Personalization has become a central feature of political communication. Politicians appear on late-night talk shows, smile from billboards, and post family photos on social media – placing themselves at the heart of public discourse. As individual personalities take center stage, abstract political ideologies and political collectives fade into the background. The Person in Politics explores the linguistic dimension of this shift through the cognitive semantic analysis of pronominal references. Drawing on a thorough account of how pronouns are used in American presidential nomination acceptance speeches and with what purpose, this work investigates how politicians emphasize individual leadership and craft collective identities with personal pronouns. Offering valuable insights into the intersection of language and political campaign rhetoric, this book is relevant for scholars of cognitive linguistics and political communication, as well as practicioners seeking to navigate the evolving field of political discourse.
Abstract This paper focuses on the use of possessive our in colonial newspapers related to the Imperial Crisis in North America (1764–1783) and analyses its exceptional frequency and distributional patterns through a corpus-based methodology. It investigates the dominant ideologies which (re-)shape the colonists’ national identity by focusing on their linguistic actualizations through a preference for the grammatical relationship of possession. The interconnection between ideologies and possessive usage reveals to what extent the British ideology of property as precondition of liberty and economic prosperity was at the basis of the British Americans’ identity before and after the Declaration of Independence. Despite the discourse polarization of our vs their, North American colonists had still a long way to go before acquiring full consciousness of their own national distinctiveness from their British fellow-countrymen.
Abstract This chapter examines the discursive realisation of female-male relations in letters to the editor (LTEs) in Elizabeth Powell’s The Orphan Reviv'd: or, Powell’s Weekly Journal (1719–1720) and four other early eighteenth-century newspapers. LTEs about female-male relations in the Orphan Reviv'd are rarely neutral in tone with evaluation evident and marked linguistically in various ways. Much of the correspondence expresses a sympathetic viewpoint of women’s condition in their relations with men. However, this positive evaluation is modified by two important considerations. First, the role of women is refracted through a male prism as seen in the discursive focus on male behaviour. Secondly, when women unreservedly express agency it is viewed negatively since it reflects unacceptable features of male behaviour.
This book offers a critical discourse analytical perspective on the phenomenon of men who voluntarily abstain from relationships with women. Based on a case study of the online Reddit community known as ‘Men Going Their Own Way’, the author engages in qualitative examination of the argumentative and discursive strategies used to justify and legitimise an antifeminist, male separatist ideology. Methodologically, the book draws on the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies and investigates how members of this online community represent themselves, relationships with women, and the broader gendered social order. It considers male separatism as part of the new antifeminist social media network known as the manosphere, as well as part of a broader legacy of backlash against feminism and women’s rights. Overall, the book contributes to the growing body of literature on the manosphere and should be of interest to scholars in discourse studies, feminist media studies, and digital communication.
Abstract In this study, we explore how the Phoenix Park murders were written about in public and private discourse, utilising the Nineteenth Century Newspaper Corpus, personal diaries and historiography. With the use of social actor analysis (van Leeuwen, 2008), we examine how events underwent ‘transformations’ as they moved from reality to record, and how over time these records worked to shape the dynamics of memory, particularly in relation to notions of accountability. Gladstone was blamed by The Times for allowing the murders to take place but, by focussing on personal relationships, the Liberal press portrayed events far more sympathetically. Soon after Gladstone’s death, an influential biography by his friend, John Morley, worked to prove that Gladstone’s reputation was beyond reproach.
Abstract The treatment of Ireland in the London press from 1640 to 1800 is investigated with the help of the ZEN and Lampeter corpora, following up on De Nie’s (2004) hypothesis that views of the Irish could have functioned as a foil for creating a British identity. Mentions of the Irish and Irish affairs matters are not only very infrequent, but also are of a nature to deny agency to the Irish. Within this picture of discursive neglect, apparently based on true English disinterest, three aspects stand out, which partly contribute to (unsystematic) othering: (i) Irish Catholicism, styled as hostile to Britain, (ii) a set of mocking stereotypes, and (iii) Ireland seen as subservient to the economic interests of England.
Abstract In the 18th century, public discussion on language was influenced by the philosophical debates of the Age of Enlightenment, bearing a theoretical character. The discussions found concrete expression in the moral weeklies (known as “Spectators”), a prototype of opinion journalism which developed from Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodical The Spectator (London, 1711–1712 and 1714). The Spectators experienced a European circulation through translations and imitations, thus contributing to the creation of wide communication networks among scholars. Concurrently, the language discussion and related ideas also spread beyond national borders. This study aims to compare the use of some topoi in the language discussions of the Spectator periodicals to investigate the continuity or innovation of metalinguistic concepts and their underlying language ideologies.
Abstract According to Woolard, language ideology studies have focused on: (1) linguistic and social differentiation; (2) linguistic authority, including also “linguistic construction of political and social authority” (2021: 12). Whereas gender differentiation may be studied on the basis of linguistic manifestations (feminatives), authority and its construction are best viewed in an emic perspective, which calls for support from the relevant metadiscourse. This paper focuses on occupational and agentive terms for women in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals in partitioned Poland. The analyses recover potential authorial attitudes based on typographic marking and characterise feminine referential terms with respect to the scores of synthetic vs. analytic and generic vs. gender-specific forms.
Abstract This paper combines corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to answer the question: What was the ideological stance on the Armenian Question in letters to the editor during the years of the genocide, and how was this stance expressed? A quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis on a corpus of LTE published in The Times between 1914 and 1926 combines a corpus-driven approach with corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The analysis of keywords and their frequent collocates and clusters shows a more nuanced picture than the simple ideology of positive ingroup vs. negative outgroup. First, the Armenian side also receives negative evaluations, albeit not detracting from its victim status. Secondly, there is a further negative outgroup apart from the Turks, namely the British government.
Abstract Conflicts have always been highly newsworthy. They receive massive coverage while inducing readers’ sympathies or antipathies, depending on which party in conflict they identify with. By adopting a corpus-assisted approach integrated with discourse analysis, this study focuses on how, in a small corpus of letters published in the press during the 1857–58 uprisings in India, the most frequent keywords and collocation patterns represent the events. The emerging data indicate how language is used to generate emotive reactions towards the Indian rebels in the readership, while legitimising the East India Company officials’ actions with the purpose of developing a sense of shared beliefs in an English identity across the empire by connecting personal concerns to a wider sense of public engagement.
Abstract News travelled quickly during the troubled 1640s in Europe and had almost palpable effects. But how did news travel, and who got it first? Weekly handwritten newsletters transmitted from sites of crisis to the Tuscan Grand Ducal court and elsewhere, are a still under-used source. This chapter analyses the similarities and differences between weekly handwritten news reporting about two places, London and Naples, both of which experienced regime-changing commotions in the 1640s, among others similarly afflicted at the time. More concretely, we will be comparing and contrasting these two cases of popular unrest resulting in the creation of new forms of government, and the linguistic ramifications of this in the realms of diction, word usage, sentiment and sense of belonging.
Abstract Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the British mainstream press had hostile views on the Woman Question, while the new feminist periodicals exposed distortions and omissions and became the ideal site for debates about gender. However, these magazines showed competing internal ideologies: the aim of this paper is to investigate on how these were represented within the movement. The corpus consists of 880 articles published by The Woman’s Signal , Votes for Women, The Vote and Common Cause (1894–1914): the analysis of keywords related to gender (woman, suffragette, and lady) reveals different sets of beliefs concerning womanhood and the emergence of internal ideologies, too, which reflected the conflicting ideas within the British first-wave feminist movement.
