Cover not available
Article published In:
Historical (socio)pragmatics at present
Edited by Matylda Włodarczyk and Irma Taavitsainen
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:2] 2017
► pp. 235–251

“He tells us that”

Strategies of reporting adversarial news in the English Civil War

| University of Florence

In this paper, I examine a form of argumentation employed by one of the most prominent parliamentarian news pamphlets of the English Civil War (1642–1649). The pamphlet in question is Mercurius Britanicus. It was founded to counter through its pages the news that was being published in Mercurius Aulicus, the foremost royalist publication. In its animadversion of Aulicus’s news, Britanicus first repeated the royalist text, and then responded to it. In my study, I shall focus on instances where the not wholly faithful reporting of Aulicus’s text leads to (socio)pragmatic meanings. I have taken into consideration both the wider social context in which the pamphlet writers were writing as well as the immediate situational context – the pamphlet as a genre. In my analysis of Britanicus’s animadversion, I examine titles of courtesy and the omission and substitution of words.

Keywords: animadversion, controversies, English Civil War, historical (socio)pragmatics, news pamphlets
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
  • 3. Britanicus’s reporting strategies
    • 3.1Titles of courtesy
    • 3.2Omission and substitution of words
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • References
Published online: 9 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00004.bro
References

Primary sources

Early English Books Online (EEBO)
Accessed August 2014 at: [URL].
Florence Early English Newspapers (FEEN)
Accessed August 2014 at: [URL].
Mercurius Aulicus
(1643–1645).Google Scholar
Mercurius Britanicus
(1643–1646).Google Scholar
Brownlees, Nicholas
2006 “Polemic and Propaganda in Civil War News Discourse.” In Nicholas Brownlees (ed.), News Discourse in Early Modern Britain, 17–40. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2012 “The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620–1665).” In Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös and Udo Fries (eds), News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis, 5–48. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
2014 [2011] The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth-Century England. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Cecconi, Elisabetta
2009 “Comparing Seventeenth-century News Broadsides and Occasional News Pamphlets: Interrelatedness in News Reporting.” In Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Early Modern English News Discourse: Newspapers, Pamphlets and Scientific News Discourse, 137–58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Claridge, Claudia
2000 “Pamphlets and Early Newspapers: Political Interaction vs. News Reporting.” In Friedrich Ungerer (ed.), English Media Texts – Past and Present: Language and Textual Structure, 25–43. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “News Discourse.” In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Historical Pragmatics, 587–620. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
2010 “Historical Sociopragmatics.” In Andreas H. Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Historical Pragmatics, 64–94. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2011 “Historical Sociopragmatics: An Introduction.” In Jonathan Culpeper (ed.), Historical Sociopragmatics, 1–8. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A.
1988 News as Discourse. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman
1995 Media Discourse. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Frank, Joseph
1961 The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fritz, Gerd
1995 “Topics in the History of Dialogue Form.” In Andreas H. Jucker (ed.), Historical Pragmatics, 469–98. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 “Text Types in a New Medium: The First Newspapers (1609).” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2 (1): 69–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 “Dialogical Structures in 17th Century Controversies.” In Marina Bondi and Sorin Stati (eds), Dialogue Analysis 2000, 199–208. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “Controversies.” In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Historical Pragmatics, 451–81. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hardie, Andrew
2012 “CQPweb – Combining Power, Flexibility and Usability in a Corpus Analysis Tool”. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17 (3): 380–409. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen
2013 English Historical Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
McElligott, Jason
2007 Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.Google Scholar
Mazzon, Gabriella
2010 “Terms of Address.” In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Historical Pragmatics, 351–76. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Nevitt, Marcus
2006 Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Palander-Collin, Minna and Minna Nevala
2006 “Reporting in Eighteenth-century Letters of Hester Pozzi.” In Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Dieter Kastovsky, Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl (eds), Syntax, Style and Grammatical Norms: English from 1500–2000, 123–41. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Peacey, Jason
2004 Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
2011 “Pamphlets”. In Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture. Volume One: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, 453–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Purkiss, Diane
2006 The English Civil War: A People’s History. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Raymond, Joad
1996 The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
2003 Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2008 “Marchamont Nedham”. In David Cannadine (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Accessed August 2014 at: [URL].
Royle, Trevor
2004 Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms. London: Abacus.Google Scholar
Russell, Conrad
1990 The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Schwitalla, Johannes
1999 “The Use of Dialogue in Early German Pamphlets: On the Constitution of Public Involvement in the Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn Controversy”. In Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds), Historical Dialogue Analysis, 111–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker
2003 Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tannen, Deborah
2007 [1989] Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Salmi, Hanna
2020. Chapter 8. “I write not to expert practitioners, but to learners”. In The Dynamics of Text and Framing Phenomena [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 317], ► pp. 187 ff. DOI logo
van de Poppe, Cora & Joanna Wall
2023. The pragmatic and rhetorical function of perfect doubling in the work of D. V. Coornhert. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 24:2 ► pp. 245 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.