The Armenian Question between 1914-1926 in Letters to the Editor – The Times

This paper investigates words and phraseology used to refer to the 1915 genocide of the Armenians before the word genocide itself was first used thirty years later. As of today, Turkey has refused to call “genocide” the systematic massacre of potentially more than one million Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, despite international pressure and press coverage. The historical events and the fate of the survivors received a considerable and uninterrupted attention in numerous letters to the editors (LTE) of major English broadsheets, amongst which The Times (Peltekian 2013). Letters to the editor have mainly been studied from a broader sociological, historical, and political perspective (Wahl-Jorgensen 2002, Richardson and Franklin 2004; Cavanagh and Steel 2019) but have rarely drawn the attention of linguists (exceptions are Pounds 2005, 2006; Romova and Hetet 2012). The methodology adopted in this study is a mixed one. A corpus-driven approach (Tognini-Bonelli 2001) integrates with discourse analysis of the most frequent words and of their phraseology (Partington 2004) used to refer to the violence against Armenians. The findings highlight the linguistic strategies used to refer to what is today considered a genocide.