British ideologies in the (re)-shaping of the American identity

Abstract

This paper focuses on the use of possessive our in colonial newspapers related to the Imperial Crisis in North America (1764–1783) and analyses its exceptional frequency and distributional patterns through a corpus-based methodology. It investigates the dominant ideologies which (re-)shape the colonists’ national identity by focusing on their linguistic actualizations through a preference for the grammatical relationship of possession. The interconnection between ideologies and possessive usage reveals to what extent the British ideology of property as precondition of liberty and economic prosperity was at the basis of the British Americans’ identity before and after the Declaration of Independence. Despite the discourse polarization of our vs their, North American colonists had still a long way to go before acquiring full consciousness of their own national distinctiveness from their British fellow-countrymen.