Representation of social actors in 17th-century English murder pamphlets: A corpus-assisted discourse study (1600-1674)

Seventeenth-century news pamphlets represented one of the major sources of information about criminality and justice. In my paper, I adopt a corpus-based approach to analyse nomination and predication strategies in 17th-century murder pamphlets from 1600 to 1674. In particular, I examine the way in which murderers, victims and judicial authorities were represented in the narrative. Variations in the encoding of the criminal reflect values and beliefs which shape the degree of aberration of the murder in relation to social variables such as gender, religion, origin and relationship with the victim. At the same time, the positive representation of legal authorities promotes an image of the judicial system as impartial, efficient and trustworthy.