Cover not available
Part of
News with an Attitude: Ideological perspectives in the historical press
Edited by Claudia Claridge
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 105] 2025
► pp. 12–32

Chapter 2
British ideologies in the (re)-shaping of the American identity

A corpus-based analysis of the possessive our in American newspapers (1764–1783)

| University of Florence
This paper focuses on the use of possessive our in colonial newspapers related to the Imperial Crisis in North America (1764–1783) and analyses its exceptional frequency and distributional patterns through a corpus-based methodology. It investigates the dominant ideologies which (re-)shape the colonists’ national identity by focusing on their linguistic actualizations through a preference for the grammatical relationship of possession. The interconnection between ideologies and possessive usage reveals to what extent the British ideology of property as precondition of liberty and economic prosperity was at the basis of the British Americans’ identity before and after the Declaration of Independence. Despite the discourse polarization of our vs their, North American colonists had still a long way to go before acquiring full consciousness of their own national distinctiveness from their British fellow-countrymen.
Keywords: American newspapers, American Revolution, corpus-based analysis, possessive our, ideologies, discursive identity, Britishness, Americanness, property, stance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Period 1: Where we are and what we are entitled to own
    • 4.2Period 2: What is licit and what is illicit
    • 4.3Period 3: What is our relationship with others, what we own and who belongs to us
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
References (28)
References
Primary sources
Brown Corpus of Present-Day American English. [URL]
Early American Newspapers Series 1690–1922. [URL]
Newspapers.com. [URL]
Secondary sources
Allison, Robert J. 2015. The American Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barnes, Timothy M. 1974. Loyalist Newspapers of the American Revolution 1763–1783: A Bibliography. Worcester Mass.: American Antiquarian Society.Google Scholar
Cecconi, Elisabetta. 2021. “From ‘British Subjects’ to ‘American People’: Transformation of National Identities in a Corpus of American Newspapers (1764–1783).” Token: A Journal of English Linguistics 12: 85–113.Google Scholar
Claridge, Claudia. 2010. “News Discourse.” In Historical Pragmatics, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, 587–620. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Copeland, David. 2002. “America, 1750–1820.” In Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America 1760–1820, ed. by Hannah Baker and Simon Burrows, 140–158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Philip. 1941. Propaganda and the American Revolution 1763–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Ely, James W.Jr. 2008. The Guardian of Every Other Right. A Constitutional History of Property Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Greene, Jack P. 1992. Imperatives, Behaviours and Identities. Essays in Early American Cultural History. Charlottesville and London: Virginia University Press.Google Scholar
1998. “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, ed. by P. J. Marshall, 208–230. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haarman, Louann and Linda Lombardo. 2009. “Introduction.” In Evaluation and Stance in War News Reporting of the 2003 Iraqui War, ed. by Louann Haarman and Linda Lombardo, 1–26. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Kaplan, David Howard and H. Herb Guntram. 2011. “How Geography Shapes National Identities.” National Identities 13 (4): 349–360. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Locke, John. 2003 [1689]. The Second Treatise of Government. [URL] (20 November 2022)
Martin, J. R. and P. R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Merritt, Richard L. 1963. “Public Opinion in Colonial America: Content-Analyzing the Colonial Press.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 27(3): 356–371. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murrin, John M. 2018. Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nord, David Paul. 2001. Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Pahta, Päivi and Irma Taavitsainen. 2010. “Scientific Discourse.” In Historical Pragmatics, ed. by Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, 549–586. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Parkinson, Robert G. 2015. “Print, the Press, and the American Revolution.” American History. Accessed November 27, 2022. DOI logo.
Partington, Alan. 2004. “Corpora and Discourse, a Most Congruous Beast.” In Corpora and Discourse, ed. by Alan Partington, John Morley and Louann Haarman, 11–20. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Scott, Mike. 2020. Wordsmith Tools 8.0. Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software.Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 2001. Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Trautsch, Jasper M. 2016. “The Origins and Nature of American Nationalism.” National Identities 18 (3): 289–312. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology. A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage.Google Scholar
2006. “Ideology and Discourse Analysis”. Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (2): 115–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zuckerman, Michael. 1987. “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden.” In Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World (1500–1800), ed. by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, 115–158. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar