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Title:
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Informalization in UK General Election Propaganda: 1964-1997
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Author:
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Michael Pearce
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/staffindex.html
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Leeds
, School of English
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Degree Date:
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2002
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Text/Corpus Linguistics
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Director(s):
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Anthea Gupta
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Abstract:
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This thesis is a study of discursive change in a corpus of election manifestos and party election broadcasts (PEBs) produced by the Labour and Conservative parties in the period 1964-1997. The main focus is ‘informalization’: the process by which linguistic practices thought of as belonging to the register of everyday conversation in the private sphere are used in public settings for strategic purposes. A related process of change is ‘marketization’, in which social domains become colonized by the language of commodity production and distribution.
‘Informalization’ and ‘marketization’ are terms particularly associated with the work of the critical discourse analyst, Norman Fairclough, whose conclusions about the extent to which public discourse has been influenced by these processes are based on the detailed analysis of a limited set of features in short texts or textual extracts. This thesis supplements Fairclough’s work by offering a methodology which identifies 46 lexicogrammatical ‘markers’ of informalization. These markers were selected using empirically-based grammars of English (in particular, the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English). The texts in the corpus were then given a ‘score’ for each feature and compared against each other. Through the large-scale surveying of the entire corpus using computer concordancing, it can be shown how the parties differ in terms of levels of formality, and what changes there are over time. Overall, there was a general increase in informalization over time, and Conservative texts were found to be more informal than Labour texts. The findings are related to other aspects of the development of the parties and their ideologies.
The thesis also offers ‘discourse histories’ of the manifesto and the PEB, and considers the relationship between their shifting generic make-up and the processes of informalization and marketization. There are also several case-studies which allow a detailed exploration of the textual manifestation of the markers. Indeed, a distinctive feature of the analysis of informalization and marketization in the thesis is this ‘multiple perspective’, which results in a richer account of the data than would have been achieved with a single approach.
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