Keywords in the Press: The New Labour Years

Building on Raymond Williams’ iconic ＂Keywords＂ released in 1975, Jeffries and Walker show how some pivotal words significantly increased in use and evolved in meaning during the years of the ’New Labour’ project. Focussing on print news media, this book establishes a set of socio-political keywords for the ’Blair Years’, and demonstrates how their evolving meanings are indicative of the ideological landscape in Britain at that time, and the extent to which the cultural hegemony of the New Labour project influenced the language of the commentariat.

Combining corpus linguistic approaches with critical stylistics the authors conduct an analysis of two newspaper corpora using computational tools. Looking closely at textually-constructed meanings within the data, their investigation of the keywords has a qualitative focus, and sets out a clear methodology for combining corpus approaches with systematic co-textual analysis.

Brian Walker is a Postgraduate Researcher at Lancaster University, UK and a Research Associate at the University of Huddersfield, UK.

Lesley Jeffries is Chair Professor of English Language and Director of the Stylistics Research Centre at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She was also Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) from 2007-10.