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Part of
Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse
Edited by Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 6] 2017
► pp. 137–155

Chapter 8
The Poor Man’s Guardian

The linguistic construction of social groups and their relations

Radical papers like The Poor Man’s Guardian had an important role in bringing about class consciousness in nineteenth-century Britain. The newspaper linguistically constructs three groups involved in the class struggle in an extended us vs. them deictic constellation, namely the rich and powerful “capitalists” vs. the working class and the radical journalists. Strategies of delegitimisation, such as third-person forms, derogatory epithets, scare quotes, are used for the rich. The other side is split into we-the journalists and we/you-working class readers. The latter are presented positively in contrast to the rich, but also as ignorant, immature, and in need of education by the journalists. The strongly pathos-oriented rhetorical style of the paper underlines the didactic aim of the paper.
Keywords: deixis, pronoun, stylistics, delegitimisation, rhetoric, group construction, punctuation, quotation, metaphor
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Politics, radical journalism, and the Poor Man’s Guardian
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Creating groups: Pronouns, address forms and epithets
    • 4.1“We” and “you”: The paper and its readers
    • 4.2“They”: Identifying the opponents
  • 5.Persuasive rhetoric
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.6.08cla
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