British colonial ideology in the language of pamphlets on Virginia (1584-1624)

This paper takes as its focus the language of exploration and settlement in a group of pamphlets recounting the English expeditions to Virginia in the period from 1584 to 1624. By adopting principles of corpus-assisted discourse analysis, I examine the way in which an emerging British colonial ideology takes shape in discourse through optimistic and deliberately distorted accounts of the discovered land. My database comprises 11 texts (about 115,000 words) taken from the Virtual Jamestown Digital Archive. Results show a predominance of positive lexical semantics, where the objective classification of commodities merges with the godly interpretation of the events and with the emotional encoding of the wonder experienced by the newcomers.