Cover not available

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

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

The rise of choice as an absolute ‘good’

A study of British manifestos (1900–2010)

 |  | University of Huddersfield |
 |  | University of Huddersfield |
Published online: 31 March 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.6.02eva
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, Lesley, and Brian Walker. 2012. “Key Words in the Press: A Critical Corpus-assisted Analysis of Ideology in the Blair Years (1998–2007).” English Text Construction 5 (2): 208–229. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) 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.
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
References (28)
References
Anthony, Laurence. 2011. AntConc (Version 3.2.2). Tokyo: Waseda University. [URL]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Atkinson, Max. 1984. Our Masters’ Voices. London: Methuen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, Paul. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, Paul, Andrew Hardie, and Tony McEnery. 2009. A Glossary of Corpus Linguistics. ­Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2006. “Britain as a Container: Immigration Metaphors in the 2005 Election Campaign.” Discourse & Society 17 (5): 563–581. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clarke, John, Janet Newman, Nick Smith, Elizabeth Vidler, and Louise Westmarland. 2007a. Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clarke, John, Janet Newman, and Louise Westmarland. 2007b. “Creating Citizen-consumers? Public Service Reform and (Un)willing Selves.” In On Willing Selves: Neoliberal Politics and the Challenge of Neuroscience, ed. by Sabine Maasen and Barbara Sutter, 125–145. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clarke, John, Nicholas Smith, and Elizabeth Vidler. 2006. “The Indeterminacy of Choice: ­Political, Policy and Organisational Implications.” Social Policy and Society 5 (3): 327–336. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clarke, John, Janet Newman, and Louise Westmarland. 2008. “The Antagonisms of Choice: New Labour and the Reform of Public Services.” Social Policy and Society 7 (2): 245–253. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Edwards, Geraint O. 2012. “A Comparative Discourse Analysis of the Construction of ‘­In-groups’ in the 2005 and 2010 Manifestos of the British National Party.” Discourse & Society 23 (3): 245–258. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jeffries, Lesley. 2010. Critical Stylistics: The Power of English. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
L’Hote, Emily. 2010. “New Labour and Globalization: Globalist Discourse with a Twist?” ­Discourse & Society 21 (4): 355–376. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Louw, Bill. 2000. “Contextual Prosodic Theory: Bringing Semantic Prosodies to Life.” In Words in Context: A Tribute to John Sinclair on His Retirement, ed. by Chris Heffer and Helen Sauntson, 48–94. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mulderrig, Jane. 2003. “Learning to Labour: The Discursive Construction of Social Actors in New Labour’s Education Policy.” In Britain Under Blair, ed. by Merle Tonnies, 123–145. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. “The Grammar of Governance.” Critical Discourse Studies 8 (1): 45–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Renouf, Antionette. 2013. “A Finer Definition of Neology in English: The Life Cycle of a Word.” In Corpus Perspectives on Patterns of Lexis, ed. by Hilder Hasselgård, Jarle Ebeling, and Signe Oksefjell Ebeling, 177–207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Salecl, Renata. 2010. Choice. London: Profile Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scott, Mike. 2010. WordSmith Tools Help. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software. Available at [URL]. Accessed 6 May 2014.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Simpson, Paul. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Simpson, Paul, and Andrea Mayr. 2010. Language and Power. Oxon: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Walby, Sylvia. 2011. The Future of Feminism. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Widdowson, Henry G. 1998. “The Theory and Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Applied Linguistics 19 (1): 136–151. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords. London: Fontana.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. 2001. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Xiao, Richard, and Tony McEnery. 2006. “Collocation, Semantic Prosody, and Near Synonymy: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective.” Applied Linguistics 27 (1): 103–129. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

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
Toolan, Michael
2018. The Language of Inequality in the News, DOI logo
Tabbert, Ulrike
2016. Critical Stylistics. In Language and Crime, ► pp. 27 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. 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.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue