“Facts only have been dealt with”. Comparing linguistic strategies in The Treatment of Armenians and in Letters to the Editor

My chapter combines corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to answer a specific research question: which linguistic strategies were used to represent the Armenian genocide in letters to the editor (LTEs) and in the official parliamentary report The Treatment of Armenians (Bryce, 1916) to support war propaganda? A combined approach of quantitative corpus-driven analysis (Tognini-Bonelli, 2001) and qualitative corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Partington, 2014, 2015; Partington et al 2013) examine a corpus of LTEs, published in The Times between 1914 and 1926, and the 1916 parliamentary Blue Book by Viscount Bryce The Treatment of Armenians, which is mostly composed of first-hand accounts in letter form. LTEs were selected from The Times and Sunday Times online archive using the search words ‘Armenia’, ‘Armenian’ and ‘Armenians’. Keywords and their frequent collocates and clusters are analysed in the LTEs and in the official report, and compared to examine the linguistic strategies used to represent the Armenian Question in relation to war propaganda. While aspects of the linguistic representation of ideology (Martini, 2025), of conflict (Martini, 2022), and of identity (Martini, 2021a) in LTEs on the Armenian genocide have been analysed, the linguistic strategies of LTEs and Blue Books have never been compared.