A corpus approach to cultural keywords: a critical corpus-based analysis of ideology in the Blair years (1998-2007) through print news reporting

This paper will report on a corpus-based study
of the cultural keywords (in the Raymond
Williams’ sense) via the analysis of key-words
(in the corpus/statistical sense) of newspaper
reporting in the years since Labour came to
power. The project demonstrates that certain
lexemes (or lexical strings) gain currency in
relatively short historical periods and may take
on political importance.
This project assesses the ideological landscape
during the years of the New Labour project by
extracting the cultural keywords of the time, and
demonstrating their evolving meanings in the
commentary provided by the print media.
The project takes inspiration from Raymond
Williams’ book ([1975] 1983)
Keywords
which
attempted to sum up the ideology of the post-
war years. Williams chose a set of words which
he thought had taken on particular meanings
in that period, and wrote an informed but
ultimately anecdotal commentary on each one.
Like Williams, we begin with a hypothesis
that some words (such as, for example,
radicalisation
,
choice
) have both increased in
usage and polarised in their meaning since 1998.
Unlike Williams, this project pursues a rigorous
approach to the discovery of
which
words
characterise the period under investigation,
using two corpora of newspaper data and
computer tools. This enables us to make a
comprehensive investigation and an objective
assessment, including use and meaning, of the
cultural keywords of the Blair years
The project is primarily corpus-based, but with
a strong qualitative focus, using an approach
to studying textually-constructed meanings
of words and other linguistic items which
recognises both their place in a relatively stable
system of language, and their capacity to take on
additional meaning in specific contexts of time
and place.
1. Background
Our project links the corpus linguistic notion
of key-words to earlier work into the ‘emergent
meaning’ of individual lexical items (see Jeffries
2003, 2006 and 2007).
Jeffries (2003) investigated the meaning of
water, in the context of the Yorkshire water crisis
of 1995. Jeffries (2006) investigated the speech
act of apology, in particular news commentators’
view of Blair’s putative apology for the Iraq
war. Jeffries (2007) was a much more extensive
consideration of the way in which the female
body was constructed by women’s magazines
in 2004. This larger study developed a system
of describing textual meaning which draws on
Hallidayan approaches to systems of linguistic
form and meaning applying his combined
semantic and syntactic view of textual meaning
to other functions such as the construction of
opposites.
The current project was designed in the spirit
of Critical Discourse Analysis, in particular the
work of Fairclough whose work on ideology
in language, and specifically the language of
New Labour (Fairclough 2000) influences the
approach taken here. However, the methods
used in this project are closer to corpus stylistics
in that they are text-analytic and at least in some
of the stages, computer-assisted and corpus-
driven. Work already carried out in this area (see
for example McIntyre and Walker 2010) showed
that corpus approaches and tools, in particular
Wmatrix, can successfully be applied to textual
analysis. Baker and McEnery (2005) and Baker
and Gabrielatos (2008) are also influential on
this project because this work has paralleled
Jeffries’ work in looking at sets of texts from a
particular time period to demonstrate political
ideologies in news texts.

2
The project also reflects renewed interest in
cultural keywords in the Williams sense, with
a recent special issue of Critical Quarterly
(2007) devoted to the subject, and Durant’s
(2006) related article which suggests that
“[...] the development of electronic search
capabilities applied to large corpora of language
use [...] encourages renewed attention to
cultural keywords.” (Durant 2006). This project
effectively takes up that suggestion.
2. Research questions
1.
What are the key-words for the years 1998–
2007, as evidenced in the British press and
can they be identified as cultural keywords?
2.
Have they developed meanings specific to
this period and have these meanings evolved
within the period?
3. Methodology
The project focuses on news texts from 1998
to the end of 2007. A corpus of comparable
data from three national daily newspapers (The
Guardian, The Independent, and The Times)
was assembled from a large, on-line newspaper
database. This database represents a very rich
and potentially overwhelming amount of data
(100s of millions of words). However, our
project had very limited timescales and we
found it necessary to carefully control the
amount of data that we collected. This was
because: (i) downloading selected articles from
the database is largely a manual and fairly time
consuming process; and (ii) in its raw form each
downloaded article contained structured extra-
textual details (headers containing titles, dates
and so forth), random intra-textual information
(such as journalist’s email addresses) and
corruptions. This extra text and corrupted
data had to be removed from and amended
in each of the downloaded files: a laborious
process which consumed a lot of project time.
We also found that the corpus tools we
used for data manipulation struggled when
presented with files of more than one million
words. Consequently, we took a structured
sampling approach, choosing a week from
the politically ‘busy’ month of September
(party conferences), and collected selected
news-related items from these weeks. The
resulting corpus was approximately 2.3 million
words, which we anticipated would be sufficient
to answer our research questions. A comparison
corpus was built along similar lines using
newspaper data from the five year period prior
to 1997 (the Major years).
The corpus was automatically analysed, in the
first instance, using Wmatrix (Rayson 2008),
which is a relatively new corpus tool that can
calculate keyness (using Log-likelihood) at the
word level (key-words), at the grammatical
level (key-POS), and the semantic level (key-
concepts). The present study uses just the key-
word output.
To address the qualitative aspect of the
research questions, this investigation included
the following considerations:
-
Do the collocations of the key-word
demonstrate particular nuances of meaning?
-
How does the semantico-syntactic behaviour
of the key-word demonstrate meaning specific
to the context?
-
Does the key-word enter into any
unconventional lexical relations (e.g. of
opposition)?
-
Is the key-word associated with any modal or
negated text worlds?
4. Results
The key-words, generated from the comparison
of our corpora, that we consider to be the
important cultural keywords from the Blair
years are as follows:
No.
Keyword
Associated key-words
1
Terror
Terrorism, terrorist(s), attacks, atrocities,
threat
2
Global
Globalisation, world, international
3
Spin
spun
4
Reform
progressive, radical, modernise(d) / er(s) /
ation
5
Choice
6
Respect
Items in the ‘keyword’ column are the main
items used in our investigation and the terms
that we consider to be culturally significant.
The items in the third column are key-words
resulting from our corpus comparison which
are related to individual (cultural) keywords
and which, we hypothesise, form a network of

3
meaning. These are still to be fully investigated
and we do not report on them in this paper.
For each keyword we provide a more detailed
quantitative commentary using concordance
and collocation data. Our major findings,
though rigorous and replicable, are qualitative,
and provide the basis of both detailed linguistic
commentaries on each key-word and could
also provide the foundation for more general
popular essays not dissimilar to those provided
by Williams, but with more clarity about their
provenance. There will not be time to discuss all
our findings, but our paper will report on some
of the quantitative data and focus qualitatively
on ‘spin’.
References
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(2007).
Critical
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.
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