Talking liberties : the rhetoric of freedom in post-War British politics
This thesis places pressure on common distinctions between rhetoric and ideology, ideas and arguments, semantics and form, by examining the use of freedom rhetoric in political speech and propaganda in post-war Britain. To do so it combines a sophisticated statistical analysis of large volumes of text with the qualitative methodologies of rhetorical analysts and political historians. In particular, it uses custom software written by the author to apply the techniques of corpus linguists, content analysts, and political scientists to a corpus of every speech made in the House of Commons between 1936 and 1990. By integrating data sources, the thesis recovers a partisan variable unrecorded in Hansard that enables the systematic detection of differences between Labour and Conservative MPs' speech for the first time. Chapter one both describes the novel techniques deployed and identifies changes in the use of freedom rhetoric over time as well as partisan sub-languages of debate. This quantitative analysis provides the context for a detailed qualitative analysis of Conservative party rhetoric between 1945 and 1970 over three further chapters. Combining archival research with theoretical insights from rhetoric and
Freeman, James George
freedom ; liberty ; rhetoric ; British politics
Talking liberties : the rhetoric of freedom in post-War British politics. This thesis places pressure on common distinctions between rhetoric and ideology, ideas and arguments, semantics and form, by examining the use of freedom rhetoric in political speech and propaganda in post-war Britain. To do so it combines a sophisticated statistical analysis of large volumes of text with the qualitative methodologies of rhetorical analysts and political historians. In particular, it uses custom software written by the author to apply the techniques of corpus linguists, content analysts, and political scientists to a corpus of every speech made in the House of Commons between 1936 and 1990. By integrating data sources, the thesis recovers a partisan variable unrecorded in Hansard that enables the systematic detection of differences between Labour and Conservative MPs' speech for the first time. Chapter one both describes the novel techniques deployed and identifies changes in the use of freedom rhetoric over time as well as partisan sub-languages of debate. This quantitative analysis provides the context for a detailed qualitative analysis of Conservative party rhetoric between 1945 and 1970 over three further chapters. Combining archival research with theoretical insights from rhetoric and
talking liberty rhetoric freedom post_war british_politics place pressure common distinction rhetoric ideology ideas argument semantics form examine use freedom rhetoric political_speech propaganda post_war britain combine sophisticate statistical_analysis large_volume text qualitative methodology rhetorical analyst political historian particular use custom software write author apply technique corpus linguist content analyst political scientist corpus every speech make house_commons integrate data_source recovers partisan variable unrecorded enable systematic detection difference labour conservative mps speech first_time describe novel technique deploy identifies change use freedom rhetoric time well partisan sub languages debate quantitative_analysis provide_context detailed qualitative_analysis conservative_party rhetoric three_chapter combining archival theoretical insight rhetoric