Inducing antipathies and sympathies. A corpus assisted analysis of letters from the 1857-58 Indian uprisings in the press

Inducing sympathies and antipathies. A corpus assisted analysis of letters from the 1857-58 Indian uprisings in the press Christina Samson – University of Florence - Italy Conflicts have always been highly newsworthy, as the selected events reported not only receive massive coverage, which builds an allure of ideas and beliefs (Fowler 1991), but they also induce readers to take a stand in the conflict (Nohrstedt 2009). The public’s sympathies or antipathies depend on how it identifies with the different parties in conflict, which ideological strategy best gains attention and emotional engagement, as in the case of letters published in the press during the 1857-58 uprisings in India (Samson 2020a; Samson 2020b) against the rule of the British East India Company, functioning as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. In the letters, the events are discursively represented within social practices that regulate collective interaction (Pahta and Taavitsainen 2010) wherein everyday life discourses have also the purpose of maintaining an asymmetrical domination of relations with the public (Thompson 2013). Letters can therefore be considered a situated activity, since they are written for a specific recipient and purpose. By adopting a corpus assisted approach integrated with discourse analysis, this study focuses on how, in a small specialised corpus of letters in the press, the most frequent keywords and collocation patterns represent the uprisings in the period under study. The emerging data indicate how the usage of language in the letters attempts to generate emotive reactions towards the Indian rebels while employing strategies of legitimisation (Van Dijk, 2005; van Leeuwen2007; Reyes 2011) of the East India Company officials’ actions. This creates two sides of the story/event in which the press and the readers are in the ‘us-group’ and the social actors depicted negatively constitute the ‘them-group’. By doing so, the process of ‘othering’ attempts to develop a sense of shared beliefs in an English identity across the empire through the connection of personal concerns to a wider sense of public engagement in the 1857-58 Indian uprisings. References Fowler, R. Language in the News. London: Taylor and Francis. Nohrstedt, S. A. 2009. New War Journalism, Nordicom Review 30 (1), 95-112. Pahta, P. and Taavitsainen, I. 2010. Scientific discourse. In: A.H. Jucker – I. Taavitsainen (eds.) Historical Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 549-586 Reyes, A. 2011. Strategies of legitimization in political discourse: From words to actions. Discourse & Society, 22(6), 781-807. Thompson J. B. 2013. Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley. Samson, C. 2020a. “The whole of Bengal is in revolt”. A corpus based analysis of letters from the 1857-58 mutinies in India’, Lingue e Linguaggi, 36, 283-296. Samson, C. 2020b. From private to public: Letters contextualising the 1857-58 mutiny in the British press. Token ,10, 59-80. van Dijk, T.A. 2005. War rhetoric of a little ally: Political implicatures and Aznar’s legitimatization of the war in Iraq, Journal of Language and Politics 4(1), 65–92. van Leeuwen, T. 2007. Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse & Communication 1(1):,91–112.