A conflict of minds. A corpus-assisted study of the linguistic positioning of Republicans and Democrats during the Iraq war

Taking as its starting point George Lakoff’s work on the differences in language usage of US conservatives and liberals, this dissertation draws on methodologies from Corpus Linguistics and the framework of Appraisal within a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective to examine a selection of node words which might possibly be typical of their different moral systems. A specially constructed corpus of 1,500,000 words was used for the analysis, encoded according to TEI guidelines and consultable using XAIRA. The criteria for selecting the node words is described, as is the subsequent choice of lemmas and phraseology. Node words expected to be typical of both conservative and liberal speech were selected, as well as possibly bidirectional phrases. The collocates of these were compared with the collocates in a general corpus and concordance lines were also examined. Lastly, the Appraisal framework as described by P.R.R. White and J.R. Martin was applied to examine the evaluation being construed. It is suggested that frequency of occurrences can only be a point of departure in evaluating the differences between conservative and liberal speech and that it is more important to take into account co-text and context in order to examine how the node words are being used.