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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. 132–153

Chapter 7
Language and ideology

The representation of the Armenian question in letters to the editor of The Times (1914–1926)

| University of Florence
This paper combines corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to answer the question: What was the ideological stance on the Armenian Question in letters to the editor during the years of the genocide, and how was this stance expressed? A quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis on a corpus of LTE published in The Times between 1914 and 1926 combines a corpus-driven approach with corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The analysis of keywords and their frequent collocates and clusters shows a more nuanced picture than the simple ideology of positive ingroup vs. negative outgroup. First, the Armenian side also receives negative evaluations, albeit not detracting from its victim status. Secondly, there is further negative outgroup apart from the Turks, namely the British government.
Keywords: historical English, news discourse, letters to the editor, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Historical context
  • 3.Letters to the editor and (conflicting?) ideologies
  • 4.Corpus construction
  • 5.Data analysis
    • 5.1Turkish vs. Armenian
      • 5.1.1Turkish
      • 5.1.2Armenian
    • 5.2Turks vs. Armenians
      • 5.2.1Turks
      • 5.2.2Armenians
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Author queries
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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