the LINC Network

A functional analysis of how the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts changed in response to the death of Diana Spencer

Natalie Osborn, Cardiff University

Dissertation Abstract (Year 3 undergraduate dissertation)

The stark contrast between the Royal and public mourning of Diana’s death, best explained as the stiff upper lip versus the trembling lip, drew attention to how disconnected the Monarchy has become from ‘the new, so-called emotionally honest Britain’ (Lee-Potter 2007), and gave way to a media-led backlash that saw their popularity plummet. In order to place themselves back in the public’s favour, and thus remain a publically funded institution, the Royals attempted to make themselves appear less remote. The scholarly and media world alike documented these modernising changes, which included the decision to make curtsying and bowing optional and the sparing use of ‘Royal Highness’ (Morton 1998: 293).

This dissertation examined four of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts in an effort to discover whether this Royal-restyle extended to the Queen’s textually created identity. A review of three political speeches’ rhetorical features generated eleven hypotheses outlining eleven linguistic changes, which if employed in the Christmas broadcasts could construct and support the Queen’s new accessible image. The analysis was approached from a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective, and thus enabled changes to be tracked across three different areas of linguistically created meaning: the enactment of relationships, the representation of experience and the construal of coherence (Martin and Rose 2003: 6).

The use of inclusive pronouns, emotionally enriched language, collective referring expressions and simplicity of structure were identified as the main strategies which helped redefine the Queen as ‘in-touch’ with her public. The conclusion centres on Billig’s (1992) observation that Royalty maintain a dual identity of ordinariness and specialness, asserting that the Queen deliberately accentuated her ‘ordinary side’ to communicate the normality of her character, and encourage Britain to identify with her ‘as a daughter, a mother and a grandmother’ (1998 Christmas broadcast).

Support Verb Constructions as Patterns of Use. A Corpus-based analysis of British and American English.

Giulia Beltrami, University of Pavia

The talk will be held April 13 at 5:10 pm in room 5.26 in the Humanities Building at Cardiff University

Abstract
Although there have been many attempts (Wierzbicka 1982, Dixon 1991/2005, Fawcett 2008) to define and describe Support Verb Constructions (SVCs), there does not seem to be an easy solution. The present work analyses a kind of SVCs which is highly frequent in the English language. This is based on the association of a ‘light’ verb (have/take) followed by an indefinite (optionally modified) eventive noun. The nominal element in these cases is not a simple deverbal noun; it is rather the uninflected form of the verb from which it derives, e.g. take a run, have a think. As for the verb, it is defined as ‘light’ in the sense that it loses part of its meaning and becomes ‘empty’. The meaning of the resultant process is therefore completed by the extension represented by the nominal element (Fawcett 2008).

This work aims at the description of regular patterns of use for SVCs. In order to do so, an approach is suggested that combines Firth’s (1957) contextual theory of meaning with Sinclair’s theory of phraseology. The regularity of use is observed in the British National Corpus and in the Corpus of Contemporary American English to study registerial and geographical variation. Results show that a fuller description of the use and variation of SVCs can be achieved through the notion of Meaning Shift Unit (Tognini Bonelli 2010), which can help to stretch the boundaries of form and meaning of SVCs showing the interrelatedness of lexico-grammar and context.