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Article published In: Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
Vol. 5:1 (2017) ► pp.57–80

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“Reservoir of rage swamps Wall St”

The linguistic construction and evaluation of Occupy in international print media

 | University of Leeds, UK
 | The Open University, UK
Published online: 16 October 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.5.1.03gre
Abstract
Originating on New York’s Wall Street, the Occupy movement was “an international network of protests against social and economic inequality that began in [September] 2011 in response to the downturn of 2008” (Thorson, Kjerstin, Kevin Driscoll, Brian Ekdale, Stephanie Edgerly, Liana Gamber Thompson, Andrew Schrock, Lana Swartz, Emily K. Vraga, and Chris Wells. 2013. “Youtube, Twitter and the Occupy Movement: Connecting Content and Circulation Practices.” Information, Communication & Society 16(3): 421–51. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, 427). Whilst there has been research on online activity in relation to Occupy, the scope of linguistic analysis to date has been somewhat narrow. Furthermore, the focus on new media has indirectly led to an absence of analysis of institutionally-endorsed traditional media texts. We adopt a mixed-method approach of corpus analysis and discourse analysis of national newspaper articles to answer questions such as ‘Is Occupy associated with a semantic field of violence and aggression?’ and ‘Who is represented as having agency?’ Our results indicate that, in our small corpus of media texts, Occupy and its supporters were predominantly portrayed negatively at the movement’s height; even though protesters are reported to have been peaceful in their majority, the English-speaking media we analysed still aligns them with language suggestive of aggression, conflict and even violence.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Investigating Occupy
  • 3.Methodology and corpus construction
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Overarching themes in the corpora
    • 4.2Naming, describing, and metaphors
    • 4.3Representing actions
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (28)
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