Propaganda in 17th-century pamphlets on Jamaica: a corpus-assisted discourse study (1655-1700)

The paper takes as its focus features of propaganda discourse in a corpus of 17th-century English pamphlets on the settlement in Jamaica (PonJ_corpus), which covers the period from 1655 to 1700. By considering propaganda as “the deliberate attempt to persuade people to think or behave in the desired way” (Taylor 2003: 12), I shall examine the way in which information was presented to the public in order to convince potential settlers to migrate to the new colony. In the attempt to tackle the discourse strategies used to maximise the impact of profitable aspects of the settlement, this paper adopts a corpus-based approach combined with discourse analysis and interprets quantitative data in light of the socio-political variables of the time. The findings show how the collocational patterns around keywords account for much of the spin attributed to the message in the attempt to achieve the desired perceptual and behavioural response in the readership.