The book examines the ways in which the 2011 UK riots were reported by the British press, by analysing the linguistic construal of the main participants involved in the protests and their agency. Starting from the assumption according to which newspapers do not just mirror reality, but rather construct it in discourse through a series of linguistic, stylistic and editorial choices, great attention is paid to how the events were construed according to different political, social and cultural stances. Since the linguistic labels employed by the newspapers to identify (and connote) the protagonists of the riots are indicative of their ideological positions, a critical attention to the specialised language of the press can be extremely noteworthy. Indeed, the urban unrest that periodically occurs, in the UK as much as within the wider European context, signals the governments’ failure to deal with persisting social and economic problems. In this regard, investigating the extent to which the media manage or fail to account for the issues that are at the heart of such violent protests, while shaping public opinions, seems an interesting challenge. A corpus of about 1,700 articles, collected from the six British newspapers with the highest circulation rates in August 2011 (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times), was therefore analysed with a corpus-based discourse analysis approach, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic depictions of the main social actors – Mark Duggan, the rioters, and the police – reveal the ideological burden affecting power relations between (élite or minority) groups within society.

Agency in the British Press: A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of the 2011 UK Riots

Nisco, Maria Cristina
2016-01-01

Abstract

The book examines the ways in which the 2011 UK riots were reported by the British press, by analysing the linguistic construal of the main participants involved in the protests and their agency. Starting from the assumption according to which newspapers do not just mirror reality, but rather construct it in discourse through a series of linguistic, stylistic and editorial choices, great attention is paid to how the events were construed according to different political, social and cultural stances. Since the linguistic labels employed by the newspapers to identify (and connote) the protagonists of the riots are indicative of their ideological positions, a critical attention to the specialised language of the press can be extremely noteworthy. Indeed, the urban unrest that periodically occurs, in the UK as much as within the wider European context, signals the governments’ failure to deal with persisting social and economic problems. In this regard, investigating the extent to which the media manage or fail to account for the issues that are at the heart of such violent protests, while shaping public opinions, seems an interesting challenge. A corpus of about 1,700 articles, collected from the six British newspapers with the highest circulation rates in August 2011 (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times), was therefore analysed with a corpus-based discourse analysis approach, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic depictions of the main social actors – Mark Duggan, the rioters, and the police – reveal the ideological burden affecting power relations between (élite or minority) groups within society.
2016
978-1-4438-8217-0
File in questo prodotto:
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11367/64440
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus ND
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 0
social impact