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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 14:6 (2015) ► pp.751–777

The rise of choice as an absolute ‘good’

A study of British manifestos (1900–2010)

| | University of Huddersfield |
| | University of Huddersfield |

In this article we report on a corpus-based study of the lexical item ‘choice’. ‘Choice’ was previously found to be a keyword in Jeffries and Walker’s (2012) study of political discourse from the New Labour years, occurring more frequently in newspaper articles during that period (1998–2007) than in those dating from the years in which John Major was Prime Minister (1990–1997). The current project investigates the use of ‘choice’ in British general election manifestos between 1900 and 2010. We first of all carry out a quantitative study of the use of ‘choice’ by the three main UK political parties across this time period, before undertaking a qualitative study of the use of the word in context. Our approach is informed by work in lexical meaning and critical stylistics, and demonstrates how ‘choice’ has taken on new semantic meanings in a political context.

Keywords: lexical semantics, corpus-based linguistics, critical stylistics, critical discourse analysis, naming, political manifestos
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Choice
    • 2.2Lexical meaning
  • 3.Quantitative Study
    • 3.1The data
    • 3.2Results
  • 4.Qualitative Study
    • 4.1Whose choice?
    • 4.2Quantifiable choice
    • 4.3Coordinates of choice
    • 4.4Real choice
    • 4.5Unmodified choice
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 March 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.6.02eva
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Gomez-Jimenez, Eva M.
2019. Book Review: Lesley Jeffries and Brian Walker, Keywords in the Press. The New Labour Years. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 28:1 ► pp. 108 ff. DOI logo
Nartey, Mark & Isaac N. Mwinlaaru
2019. Towards a decade of synergising corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis: a meta-analysis. Corpora 14:2 ► pp. 203 ff. DOI logo
Tabbert, Ulrike
2016. Critical Stylistics. In Language and Crime, ► pp. 27 ff. DOI logo
Toolan, Michael
2018. The Language of Inequality in the News, DOI logo

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