Empowerment and disempowerment in the Glencairn Uprising

Abstract

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 partiallyquantitative 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.

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Lexico-grammatical portraits of vulnerable women in war

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“…the text's relationship with other texts, and other types of text. It has been suggested elsewhere that such practices in relation to historical data are largely inaccessible (Prentice and Hardie 2009). However, we do have the information that the Depositions are written records of spoken testimony, recorded by scribes with the authority of commissioners employed by the government.…”

“…The use of large electronic bodies of language data (corpora) and the various tools provided by corpus linguistic software has provided critical discourse analysts with an indispensable set of resources for uncovering evidence of power imbalances and ideology (see, for example, Krishnamurthy 1996;Baker and McEnery 2005;Prentice and Hardie 2009). Corpus methods allow for a quantitative angle to an analytical approach that has traditionally been wholly qualitative, thus addressing some of the criticisms that have been levelled at discourse analysis on the grounds of potential researcher bias (Baker 2006).…”

The language of “Ribbonmen”: A CDA approach to identity construction in nineteenth-century Irish English threatening notices

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