Shaping Reality in English Civil War Adversarial News Discourse: A corpus-based lexical study of Royalist and Parliamentarian newsbooks and broadsides

• Autores: Elisabetta Cecconi
• Localización: Shaping realities in news reporting: from Early Modern English to the dawn of the twentieth century / coord. por Nicholas Brownlees, Elsa-Simoes-Lucas Freitas, Sandra Tuna, Jorge Pedro Sousa, 2018, ISBN 9789897291920, págs. 43-56
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In my paper I shall analyse 17th century Civil War propaganda discourse in two news genres which were very popular at the time: Civil War newsbooks and Civil War broadside ballads. As representatives of the former genre I shall examine the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus and the Parliamentarian Mercurius Britanicus, whereas a selection of news broadsides from The Cavalier and Puritan: Ballads and Broadsides illustrating the period of the Great Rebellion (1640-1660) will constitute evidence for the latter category. Each of the two news genres will be further subdivided into Royalist vs Parliamentarian news publications, in relation to their religious and political orientation. The four resulting subcorpora will be investigated in terms of frequent words and lexico-syntactic patterns by applying tools of corpus linguistics methodology. The different way in which the Royalist and the Parliamentarian press shape reality in discourse will cast light on the degree of lexical interrelatedness existing between news genres which share the same ideological stance.

    A comparison of the frequency lists elaborated for each subcorpus singles out three major lexico-semantic fields which will be the object of a quantitative and qualitative analysis:

    religion, rebellion and loyalty. The three concepts are differently distributed and used in the Royalist as opposed to the Parliamentarian news publications. By means of illustration, religious words referring to the Church as institution are more frequently employed in the godly propaganda discourse, both in the form of newsbook and broadside.

    Mercurius Aulicus and the Royalist ballads, on the other hand, tend to skip over controversial religious words (e.g. “Reformation”, “Salvation”, “Popery”, “Bishops”, “Prelates”) and insist on the more secular concept of loyalty and obedience to the king. In the course of my analysis I shall seek to demonstrate how different lexical preferences in Civil War adversarial news discourse respond to the authors/editors’ need to establish consensus around a vision of reality consciously construed to be interpreted as the orthodox one.