Shaping Realities in English Civil War Adversarial News Discourse: A Corpus-based Lexical Study of Royalist and Parliamentarian Newsbooks and Broadsides

In this chapter I provide a comparative corpus-based discourse analysis of the language used in Royalist and pro-Parliament press in the English Civil War. In particular, I aim to show how mid-17th century adversarial journalism rests on a stock of keywords - bundled in different ways - in order to frame two opposing representations of reality, each striving to achieve official recognition among the readership. The politically opinionated text-types which are taken into account are news broadside ballads and newsbooks,of Royalist and pro-Parliament stance. My study can be inserted within the field of critical discourse analysis which considers language as a social practice and analyses the way in which discourse ideologically shapes and is - in its turn - shaped by relation of power, dominance and bias within a specific socio-political and historical context.