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A Corpus Linguistic Investigation Into the Media

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A Corpus Linguistic Investigation Into the Media A CORPUS LINGUISTIC INVESTIGATION INTO THE MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF TilE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT KA TIIERINE E. GUPTA, MA Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2013 IMAGING SERVICES NORTH Boston Spa, Wetherby West Yorkshire, LS23 7BQ www.bl.uk THESIS CONTAINS CD Abstract This thesis focuses on the representation of the women's suffrage movement in The Times newspaper between 1908 and 1914. I assemble two focused corpora from texts from News International's The Times Digital Archive: the 7 million word Suffrage corpus and the 400,000 word Letters to the Editor corpus. I then combine historical research into the suffrage movement, corpus linguistic analysis of social discourses and approaches drawn from critical discourse analysis. The suffrage movement was not a unified one; it was composed of various groups with differing backgrounds, ideologies and aims. Historians working with suffragist-produced texts have noted different terminology used to describe different factions of the movement. Less attention has been paid to how the suffrage movement was perceived by those outside the movement, and particularly how it was represented in the press. Central to this thesis is Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) argument that polyvocal, heterogeneous entities are simplified and erased by those in power. I demonstrate that such a simplification of diverse suffrage identities occurs on a lexical level through the consistent use of suffragist to describe all suffrage campaigners, including acts more commonly associated with suffragettes. This conflation of identities also occurred on a textual level through what I define as the 'suggestive placement' of texts within an article. I argue that suggestively placed pro­ suffrage texts offering a counter discourse are read in the context of the master narrative of suffrage campaigners as violent and dangerous. By focusing on a self-contained, historical movement this thesis is able to analyse changes in historical political discourses, offers corpus linguistic researchers working with contemporary social movements a point of comparison and proposes a methodology for working within the constraints of the data to get useful results. As an interdisciplinary project, it will offer historians a different perspective on ideologies as expressed through language. Acknowledgements This PhD has been a somewhat complicated journey involving three departments at two universities. One of the few constants has been my supervisor, Michaela Mahlberg. She introduced me to corpus linguistics as an undergraduate, supervised my MA dissertation and has been my PhD supervisor. Her guidance, patience and advice have been invaluable and I am deeply indebted to her. I am grateful to Gertrud Erbach at News International for allowing me to use material from The Times Digital Archive. Using The Times Digital Archive data in this thesis has been an exciting experience, and without Ms Erbach's assistance would not have been possible. I would also like to thank Mike Scott for his aid with WordSmith and Andrew Hardie for his programming expertise, my postgraduate colleagues at the University of Liverpool and the University of Nottingham, Lydia Wallman and Wenonah Barton at the School of English, University of Nottingham, Lynn Brown formerly at the Centre for English Language Education, University of Nottingham and Cathy Rees at the School of English, University of Liverpool. In no particular order, I thank Clare Parody, Laura Morris, lona Sharma, Heather Froehlich, Jeremy Lin, Lizzie Reed, Liz Kedge, Hannah Ridge and Mark Burden for the conversations, food, music, tea and ideas they brought into my life. I would also like to thank my sister, the newly conferred Dr Jen Gupta, for her failed but duly acknowledged attempt at sibling rivalry. Finally, I thank my parents, John and Maureen Gupta. They have supported and encouraged me throughout the PhD and I wouldn't have been able to do it without them. This thesis is dedicated to them. Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................ 2 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... 3 Concordances and figures ............................................................................................ 9 Appendices ................................................................................................................... 9 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 10 2 Using linguistic approaches to historical data: examining the suffrage movement with corpus and discourse analysis ............................................................................ 24 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 24 , 2.1 The women's suffrage movement .................................................................... 25 2.1.1 Diversity within the suffrage movement.. ................................................. 29 2.1.2 Potential sites of unity ............................................................................... 39 2.2 Corpus linguistics ............................................................................................. 41 2.2.1 Research using small, focused corpora ..................................................... 50 2.2.2 Research using closed corpora .................................................................. 54 2.2.3 The value of small and closed corpora ...................................................... 56 2.3 Critical Discourse Analysis .............................................................................. 58 2.3.1 Master narratives and counter narratives .................................................. 63 2.3.2 The principles of newsworthiness ............................................................. 69 2.3.3 Social actor theory ..................................................................................... 74 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 76 3 Methodology ........................................................................................................... 79 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 79 3.1 Research questions ........................................................................................... 80 3.2 Steps of the analysis ......................................................................................... 83 3.3 Data .................................................................................................................. 85 4 3.3.1 Pre-assembled corpora .............................................................................. 85 3.3.2 Digitalised newspaper archives ................................................................. 88 3.3.3 The Times Digital Archive ........................................................................ 90 3.4 The Suffrage corpus and the Letters to Editor subcorpus ................................ 95 3.4.1 Selection of years ...................................................................................... 97 3.4.2 Using suffrag* terms to construct the corpora ........................................ 100 3.4.3 Using small focused corpora ................................................................... 102 3.5 Corpus Linguistic analysis ............................................................................. 103 3.5.1 Concordance and collocation analysis .................................................... 107 3.5.2 Categorising data ..................................................................................... 1 I 0 3.6 Critical discourse analysis .............................................................................. 1 14 3.6.1 From news event to news report ............................................................. 115 3.6.2 Discourse and narrative ........................................................................... 1 16 3.6.3 Social actors ............................................................................................ 119 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 119 4 The taint o/militancy is not upon them: suffragists, militants and direct action .. 122 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 122 4.1 Frequency of suffrage terms in the Suffrage corpus ...................................... 124 4.2 Classification of strongly associated collocates ............................................. 126 4.3 Direct action ................................................................................................... 133 4.3.1 suffrag* + disturbance* .......................................................................... 135 4.3.2 suffrag* + outrage * ................................................................................ 138 4.3.3 suffrag* + violence ................................................................................. 141 4.3.4 su.ffrag* + crime* .................................................................................... 143 4.3.5 suffrag* + disorder ................................................................................
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