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Oppositions and Ideology
in News Discourse
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Advances in Stylistics
Series Editor: Dan McIntyre, University of Huddersfield, UK
Editorial Board:
Jean Boase-Beier, University of East Anglia, UK; Beatrix Busse, University of Berne,
Switzerland; Szilvia Csábi, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary; Monika Fludernik,
University of Freiburg, Germany; Lesley Jeffries, University of Huddersfield, UK;
Manuel Jobert, Jean Moulin University, France; Geoffrey Leech, Lancaster University,
UK; Larry Stewart, College of Wooster, USA.
Other Titles in the Series:
Chick Lit: The Stylistics of Cappuccino Fiction, Rocío Montoro
Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice, Yufang Ho
D. H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint, Violeta Sotirova
Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond, Roberta Piazza
I. A. Richards and the Rise of Cognitive Stylistics, David West
Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse, Matt Davies
Opposition in Discourse, Lesley Jeffries
Pedagogical Stylistics, Michael Burke, Szilvia Csábi, Lara Week and Judit Zerkowitz
Stylistics and Shakespeare’s Language, Mireille Ravassat
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Oppositions and Ideology
in News Discourse
Matt Davies
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
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Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square 175 Fifth Avenue
London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10010
UK USA
www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2013
© Matt Davies, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
Matt Davies has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as Author of this work.
Articles from the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror are reprinted with permission.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining
from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury
Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-4633-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davies, Matt.
Oppositions and ideology in news discourse / Matt Davies.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-8060-5 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-6044-7 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-
4411-4633-5 (pdf) 1. Debates and debating in mass media--Great Britain. 2. Discourse
analysis--Political aspects--Great Britain. 3. Mass media--Political aspects--Great Britain.
4. Journalism--Objectivity--Great Britain. 5. Journalism--Great Britain--Language. 6.
Journalism--Political aspects--Great Britain. 7. Ideology--Political aspects--Great Britain. I.
Title.
P96.D382G74 2013
072.01’41--dc23
2012035232
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface ix
Symbols and Typographical Conventions xiii
List of Tables xv
List of Figures xvii
1 Introducing Constructed Oppositions in News Discourse 1
2 Lexical Semantic Approaches to Opposition 19
3 The Role of Syntactic Frames in Opposition Triggering 43
4 The Role of Conceptual Relations in Opposition Triggering 93
5 Case Study 1: The Ideological Function of Clustered Oppositions in the
Representation of Anti-War Protestors 123
6 Case Study 2: A Comparison of the Role of Constructed Oppositions in
Two News Reports of a Countryside Alliance Protest March 147
7 Oppositions and Ideological Cohesion 179
8 A New Approach to Studying the Construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in News
Discourse 189
Notes 211
References 215
Index 219
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Acknowledgements
When Cruse (1986) introduced his chapter on opposites by noting there is a thin line
between the canonical opposites love and hate, it would not be surprising if he was
referring to writing a book. That this study became a labour of love much more than
a labour of hate (on a gradable rather than mutually exclusive plane of difference)
is down to the unwavering support of a number of people as well as the fascinating
subject matter.
I am hugely grateful to Professor Lesley Jeffries in the English Department at the
University of Huddersfield whose original research proposal kick-started many of
the ideas in this study, and which I adapted and distorted with reckless abandon.
Lesley’s book Opposition in Discourse: The Construction of Oppositional Meaning
(2010) is an important companion title to mine in the same ‘Advances in Stylistics’
series and should be studied alongside this book. I am equally heavily indebted to
Dr Dan McIntyre, also from the University of Huddersfield, who provided invaluable
advice and encouragement in the writing up of this study. Thanks also to all my other
colleagues in the English departments at the University of Huddersfield and more
recently the University of Chester, especially those with whom I have shared coffee
and offices and who have had to cope with my distracted mumblings and mad stares.
The University of Huddersfield provided the much needed financial resources for this
research for which I am much obliged. I am also very grateful to all of my students
over the years who have indulged my opposition word association experiments (and
also bad puns).
On a more personal note, I would not have been able to finish this book without the
love and support of the amazing Susan, my two boys Oscar and Alfie, and my parents
Trevor and Christine who have gone well beyond the call of duty in coping with my
non-standard life decisions.
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Preface
The structure of this book is influenced by a number of strands of inquiry reflecting
the interdisciplinary nature of this study, including ideology, news discourse, opposi-
tions (hence the title of the book) and lexical semantics.
My primary interest is investigating how news discourse represents the same
realities in multi-faceted ways, whilst predominantly reflecting the ideas, values and
preoccupations of those in power. The stereotyping and stigmatizing of individuals
and groups seen as threatening, extreme, ‘other’, is the staple diet of news stories,
and this study started as an investigation into how binary oppositions in discourse
contributed to these ‘othering’ processes.
However, my research soon went in a number of interesting directions. A report
in the Sunday Mirror (dated 16 February 2003) of the Stop the War Coalition protest
march that took place in London on 15 February 2003 provided examples of opposi-
tions which played a major role in the overall polemic of the news report. It was
fascinating how the writer, who supported the aims of the demonstrators, expended
an inordinate amount of energy using artificial oppositions to stigmatize certain
groups of protestors in favour of others. These ‘constructed’ oppositions (i.e. those
not conventionally recognized as opposites in everyday discourse) included pairs
such as ‘placard’/‘banner’. To reassure myself that this pair would not conventionally
be treated as opposites I conducted several word association tests at conferences and
within seminar groups, and thankfully nobody came up with ‘placard’ as the opposite
of ‘banner’, otherwize this investigation would have fallen at the first hurdle. So one of
the first jobs was to justify further how it was that these and other words and phrases
were being triggered as oppositions in this particular article, and also how it is we
could understand this pair as opposites at the conceptual level. A detailed analysis
of this news report is the focus of Chapter Five. At the same time I came across
Steven Jones’s (2002) pioneering study Antonymy: A Corpus-based Perspective, which
showed how conventional opposites (‘antonyms’) tended to be framed by certain
easily identifiable syntactic structures (such as ‘X not Y’). Jones’s typology of these
syntactic structures provided a valuable foundation for exploring more examples of
‘non-canonical’ oppositions in texts similar to the one above.
Part of my mission has been to unpick the mystery of what constitutes an
opposition, and whether there is indeed a set of pre-conditions without which pairs
of words cannot be deemed oppositional. My tentative conclusion is that syntactic
frames common to housing conventional one-word oppositions can also potentially
trigger oppositional concepts from any words, phrases, or even clauses which sit in
the X/Y positions of these frames. It is important therefore to point out to anybody
approaching this book with the aim of reading about the hegemonic force of the press
and the perpetuation of dominant ideology in discourse, that you will probably feel
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